A Study of Mobile Information Exploration with Multi-touch Interactions

Compared to desktop interfaces, touch-enabled mobile devices allow richer user interaction with actions such as drag, pinch-in, pinch-out, and swipe. While these actions have been already used to improve the ranking of search results or lists of recommendations, in this paper we focus on understanding how these actions are used in exploration tasks performed over lists of items not sorted by relevance, such as news or social media posts. We conducted a user study on an exploratory task of academic information, and through behavioral analysis we uncovered patterns of actions that reveal user intention to navigate new information, to relocate interesting items already explored, and to analyze details of specific items. With further analysis we found that dragging direction, speed and position all implied users’ judgment on their interests and they offer important signals to eventually learn user preferences.