Mobile findex: supporting mobile web search with automatic result categories

Designing an effective mobile search user interface is challenging, as interacting with the results is often complicated by the lack of available screen space and limited interaction methods. This paper presents Mobile Findex; a mobile search user interface that uses automatically computed categories to present the user with an overview of the result set. In addition, it utilizes a focus+context result list presentation combined with an intuitive browsing method to aid the user in the evaluation of results. A user study with 16 participants was carried out to evaluate Mobile Findex. Subjective evaluations show that Mobile Findex was clearly preferred by the participants over the traditional ranked result list in terms of ease of finding relevant results, suitability to tasks and perceived efficiency. While the use of categories resulted in a lower rate of non-relevant result selections, an overall significant difference in search performance was not observed.