Understanding mobile Q&A usage

Abstract

Recently questioning and answering (Q&A) communities that facilitate knowledge sharing among people have been introduced to the mobile environments such as Naver Mobile Q&A and ChaCha. These mobile Q&A services are very different from traditional Q&A sites in that questions/answers are short in length and are exchanged via mobile devices (e.g., SMS or mobile Internet). While traditional Q&A sites have been well investigated, so far little is known about the mobile Q&A usage. To understand mobile Q&A usage, we analyzed 2.4 million question/answer pairs spanning a 14 month period from Naver Mobile Q&A and performed a complementary survey study of 555 active mobile Q&A users. We find that mobile Q&A is deeply wired into users' everyday life activities-its usage is largely dependent on users' spatial, temporal, and social contexts; the key factors of mobile Q&A usage are accessibility/convenience of mobile Q&A, promptness of receiving answers, and users' satisficing behavior of information seeking (i.e., minimizing efforts and settling with good enough information). We also observe that users tend to seek more factual information attributed to everyday life activities than they do on traditional Q&A sites and that they exhibit unique interaction patterns such as repeating and refining questions as coping strategies in seeking information needs. Our main findings reported in the paper have significant implications on the design of mobile Q&A systems.

Analyzing crowd workers in mobile pay-for-answer q&a

“…Nam et al [19] found a similar trend in Naver KiN; answerers' participation on Naver KiN is intermittent, and their expertise lower than is in often found in specialized online forums [19]. This trend persists in mobile Q&A [17]. The time it takes for questions to be answered on social Q&A sites tends to be fairly long.…”

“…Hsieh et al [13] showed that in Microsoft Live Q&A, the average time was almost 3 hours, with 20% of questions never even receiving an answer. The average time in Naver's mobile Q&A was 15.5 minutes, and 34% of the questions were not answered; unlike traditional social Q&A, mobile Q&A users often repeat or refine their information needs over a series of questions as coping strategies [17]. Yang et al [26] studied two-year-long Q&A datasets from multiple social Q&A sites to understand user lifespan and community stability.…”

Towards Designing Social Question-and-Answer Systems for Behavioral Support of Individuals with Autism

“…Social media technologies are deeply wired into users' everyday lives, and facilitate soliciting information from one's social connections [9], from online communities [10] and social networks [13], [14]. The affordance of social media ameliorates face-to-face social interaction overload with visual anonymity and time flexibility [11].…”

“…Thus, we focused on ten discussion boards (3,4,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14) in which the forum users discuss their everyday experiences, concerns, and challenges. Using the python library Beatifulsoup4 [22], we collected 1,945 threads (28,960 individual posts) from the discussion board archives over a time period from June 1, 2010 to July 27, 2013.…”

“Remember to hand out medals”: Peer rating and expertise in a question-and-answer study group

“…Panovich, Miller, and Karger (2012) examined the role of tie strength in responses to status message questions on Facebook, while Paul, Hong and Chi (2012) analyzed questions asked on Twitter and found that 42% of questions were rhetorical. Social media question asking in specific communities, such as the blind (Bigham et al, 2010) and mobile phone users (Lee, Kang, Yi, Yi, & Kantola, 2012), has also been a topic of inquiry.…”