Inspection Mechanisms for Community-based Content Discovery in Microblogs

This paper presents a formative evaluation of an interface for inspecting microblog content. This novel interface introduces filters by communities, and network structure, as well as ranking of tweets. It aims to improving content discovery, while maintaining content relevance and sense of user control. Participants in the US and the UK interacted with the interface in semi-structured interviews. In two iterations of the same study (n=4, n=8), we found that the interface gave users a sense of control. Users asked for an active selection of communities, and a more fine-grained functionality for saving individual ‘favorite’ users. Users also highlighted unanticipated uses of the interface such as iteratively discovering new communities to follow, and organizing events. Informed by these studies, we propose improvements and a mock-up for an interface to be used for future larger scale experiments for exploring microblog content.