Mobile search with text messages: designing the user experience for google SMS.

ABSTRACTSMS (Short Message Service) is already a hugely popular communication technology for mobile phones, with users sending billions of text messages to each other every year. The goal of the Google SMS service is to provide this large existing base of users with access to the types of information they are most likely to need when mobile. Users simply send their query as a text message and receive their results in the reply. This enables users to search for information without having to upgrade their phone or subscribe to specialized mobile data services. In this paper we describe how we worked with the Google SMS team on the iterative design of the service's user experience. In particular, we focus on how we attempted to overcome two major constraints: the technical limitations of the SMS standard, and users' current conceptual models of both SMS and Google search.