Experienced web users have strategies for information search and re-access that are not directly supported by web browsers or search engines. We studied how prevalent these strategies are and whether even experienced users have problems with searching and re-accessing information. With this aim, we conducted a survey with 236 experienced web users. The results showed that this group has frequently used key strategies (e.g., using several browser windows in parallel) that they find important, whereas some of the strategies that have been suggested in previous studies are clearly less important for them (e.g., including URLs on a webpage). In some aspects, such as query formulation, this group resembles less experienced web users. For instance, we found that most of the respondents had misconceptions about how their search engine handles queries, as well as other problems with information search and re-access. In addition to presenting the prevalence of the strategies and rationales for their use, we present concrete designs solutions and ideas for making the key strategies also available to less experienced users.

Long result lists from web search engines can be tedious to use. We designed a text categorization algorithm and a filtering user interface to address the problem. The Findex system provides an overview of the results by presenting a list of the most frequent words and phrases as result categories next to the actual results. Selecting a category (word or phrase) filters the result list to show only the results containing it. An experiment with 20 participants was conducted to compare the category design to the de facto standard solution (Google-type ranked list interface). Results show that the users were 25% faster and 21% more accurate with our system. In particular, participants' speed of finding relevant results was 40% higher with the proposed system. Subjective ratings revealed significantly more positive attitudes towards the new system. Results indicate that the proposed design is feasible and beneficial. q

We have previously found the elderly users to face several usability problems with the current search engines. Thus, we designed an elderly–friendly search interface, Etsin. To evaluate the success of the design, a usability study was conducted for comparing the usability of Etsin and Google. The participants faced fewer usability problems when using Etsin than Google and they valued the clarity of the Etsin interface. In conclusion, elderly users benefit from a simplified search engine interface that is easy to understand and that takes into account age–related issues.

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Small hand-held touchpads can be used to replace stylusbased digitizing tablets when the use of a stylus is not convenient. In text entry tasks where the writing surface is held in a hand the error rate becomes a problem. The small size of strokes compared to the width of the fingertip and the additional imprecision caused by the interaction of the pad and finger movements make input very imprecise. We describe a new improved clock-face based stroke system for entering numbers with a touchpad. In a 20-session user study with 6 users we found slightly better throughput of successfully entered numbers with the proposed new system. This advantage was mainly due to lower error rate with the new system. User preference similarly slightly favored the new system over an earlier straightforward proposal based on the clock metaphor.