Effective search results summary size and device screen size: Is there a relationship?

Abstract

In recent years, small screen devices have seen widespread increase in their acceptance and use. Combining mobility with increased technological advances many such devices can now be considered mobile information terminals. However, user interactions with small display devices remain a challenge due to the inherent input restrictions and limited display capabilities. These challenges are particularly evident for tasks, such as information seeking. For the presentation of retrieval results we consider that a personalised and context dependent approach could offer benefits, particularly for retrieving information in a non-traditional environment. As a starting point, in this paper we report an investigation into the effects of summary length as a function of screen size, where query-biased summaries are used to present retrieval results. Following a brief description of our proposed system, we report a user study aimed at exploring whether there is an optimal summary size for three types of device (smartphone, PDA and laptop), given their different screen sizes.

Understanding information preview in mobile email processing

“…Sweeney and Crestani investigated the relationship between device display size and the summary length of web search results and found that users were the most effective with shorter summaries on all devices [20]. More generally, conventional wisdom with mobile device interface design has been to reduce the amount of scrolling required [12], but this design guideline may not be as applicable today given the greater ease of scrolling associated with the current generation of touchscreen devices.…”

Browsing on small displays by transforming Web pages into hierarchically structured subpages

“…People have studied how thumbnails help users to recall their memories on previously visited web pages and how summaries help users to make correct relevance decisions [Czerwinski et al 1999;Woodruff et al 2001;Kaasten et al 2002;Sweeney and Crestani 2006]. Woodruff et al [2001] compared the efficiencies of textuallyenhanced thumbnails, plain thumbnails, and textual summaries in navigating web pages to find different types of information.…”

Interactive information retrieval

“…Thumbnails can be used here as well as typical text summaries, which may (Buyukkokten, Kalijuvee, Garcia-Molina, Paepcke, & Winograd, 2002) or may not use information on the structure of the document being summarized (Sweeney & Crestani, 2006). Sweeney and Crestani (2006) point to an interesting distinction between effectiveness and preference.…”

“…Thumbnails can be used here as well as typical text summaries, which may (Buyukkokten, Kalijuvee, Garcia-Molina, Paepcke, & Winograd, 2002) or may not use information on the structure of the document being summarized (Sweeney & Crestani, 2006). Sweeney and Crestani (2006) point to an interesting distinction between effectiveness and preference. In their study of optimal summary length for handheld device presentation they find that people prefer longer summaries on larger devices but this does not make them more accurate at using summaries to predict relevance.…”