Laura Marcial defends her dissertation, "Moving Beyond the Desktop: Searching for Information with Limited Display Size"

Laura Marcial's dissertation defense will be on Tuesday, July 10th, in Manning Hall room 304, at 9am.  All are welcome to attend the defense which is open to the public.   

Laura's committee includes Bernard Fuemmeler (Duke), Brad Hemminger (chair), Diane Kelly, Gary Marchionini and Barbara Wildemuth.

The title of Laura's dissertation is: "Moving Beyond the Desktop: Searching for Information with Limited Display Size"

Abstract:  Increasingly, users are performing more sophisticated types of tasks, like information search, across computing platforms. We examined comparative task execution times for searching tasks under three different conditions: varying screen sizes (desktop, tablet, smartphone), varying interaction devices (mouse & keyboard and touchscreen), and varying types of search (within document (WD), known item (KI), and exploratory (EXP)). Our results suggest that the typical user should expect to spend about 38% more time completing a WD task on the mobile device than they would at the desktop or on the tablet. On average, a user spent 203% more time completing a KI task on the mobile device than they did at the desktop (125% more than on the tablet) and about 35% more time on the tablet than the desktop. For the KI task, at least 38% of the extra time spent using the mobile device using a generic website is due to latency. For the EXP task, users found that the poor support for browser based tabs (multiple open windows) on the mobile and tablet made the search process more cumbersome. In general, user perception, in terms of task load and usability, aligned well with actual task execution times.