Highlighting can be mentally taxing for learners who are often unsure about how much information they needed to include. We introduce the idea of intentionally uncertain input in the context of highlighting on mobile devices. We present a system that uses force touch and fuzzy bounding boxes to support saving information while users are uncertain about where to highlight.

Abstract

Patients researching medical diagnoses, scientist exploring new fields of literature, and students learning about new domains are all faced with the challenge of capturing information they find for later use. However, saving information is challenging on mobile devices, where the small screen and font sizes combined with the inaccuracy of finger based touch screens makes it time consuming and stressful for people to select and save text for future use. Furthermore, beyond the challenge of simply selecting a region of bounded text on a mobile device, in many learning and data exploration tasks the boundaries of what text may be relevant and useful later are themselves uncertain for the user. In contrast to previous approaches which focused on speeding up the selection process by making the identification of hard boundaries faster, we introduce the idea of intentionally supporting uncertain input in the context of saving information during complex reading and information exploration. We embody this idea in a system that uses force touch and fuzzy bounding boxes along with posthoc expandable context to support identifying and saving information in an intentionally uncertain way on mobile devices. In a two part user study we find that this approach reduced selection time and was preferred by participants over the default system text selection method.

Presentation (UIST 2016)

Demo Video

Downloads

PDF Download ACM Digital Library

Citation

1
2
3
4

Joseph Chee Chang, Nathan Hahn, and Aniket Kittur. 2016.
Supporting Mobile Sensemaking Through Intentionally Uncertain Highlighting.
In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '16).
ACM, New York, NY, USA, 61-68. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2984511.2984538

Bibtex

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

@inproceedings{Chang:2016:SMS:2984511.2984538,
 author = {Chang, Joseph Chee and Hahn, Nathan and Kittur, Aniket},
 title = {Supporting Mobile Sensemaking Through Intentionally Uncertain Highlighting},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
 series = {UIST '16},
 year = {2016},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-4189-9},
 location = {Tokyo, Japan},
 pages = {61--68},
 numpages = {8},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2984511.2984538},
 doi = {10.1145/2984511.2984538},
 acmid = {2984538},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords = {annotation, capture, copy-paste, highlighting., information, saving, sensemaking},
}