Mobile Facets – Faceted Search and Exploration of Open Social Media Data on a Touchscreen Mobile Phone

We present the user-centered, iterative design of Mobile Facets, a mobile application for the faceted search and exploration of a large, multidimensional data set of social media on a touchscreen mobile phone. Mobile Facets provides retrieval of resources such as places, persons, organizations, and events from an integration of different open social media sources and professional content sources, namely Wikipedia, Eventful, Upcoming, geo-located Flickr photos, and GeoNames. The data is queried live from the data sources. Thus, in contrast to other approaches we do not know in advance the number and type of facets and data items the Mobile Facets application receives in a specific contextual situation. While developing Mobile Facets, we have continuously evaluated it with a small group of five users. We have conducted a task-based, formative evaluation of the final prototype with 12 subjects to show the applicability and usability of our approach for faceted search and exploration on a touchscreen mobile phone.