Presenting social media information on mobile devices using multiple contexts

Structured Abstract Purpose. Research has shown that when presenting large amounts of social media information on small devices, design should consider multiple contexts which include user preferences, time, location, environment and so on. It should also take into account the purpose of use, for example, the kind of tasks undertaken by users. However, little research has been done on the organization of social media information by multiple context and tasks. Design/methodology/approach. Using tourism as a domain, we conducted a user evaluation study with a prototype to investigate users' preferred ways of organizing different types of social media information based on multiple contexts. Findings. In this paper, we present a sequence of context types for organizing four types of social media information (recommendations, events, friends, and media elements). The study revealed that users preferred to view recommendations by location and environment context, events by location and temporal Page 2 of 26 context, contacts by location and identity context and finally, list of media elements by environment and identity context. Research limitations/implications. There may be different sequences of context types for organizing social media information in domains other than tourism. Researchers are encouraged to analyze users' needs in other domains so as to find their preferred ways of organizing social media information. Practical implications. This paper includes implications for the design and development of user interface, in particular, for mobile applications presenting large amount of social media information. Originality/value. It presents a new way of organizing social media information using multiple context types and with consideration of users' needs. have looked into breaking down and displaying information in chunks to improve readability and provide easy navigation on the small screens of mobile devices. Such chunked information should be clear and concise. This is consistent with mobile user interface design guidelines which propose to organize chunks of information in a top-down hierarchy so that users are presented with high level information and can decide whether or not to retrieve detailed information (Hurst & Darzentas, 2012). Hierarchical chunking facilitates better organizing and easy retrieving of information (Burigat display content from the content providers' perspective so as to allow reusability and sharing of content content and its readability when displayed. DiMarco (2010) emphasized that information should be chunked and arranged to inform users and to improve usability. Existing mobile applications chunk information differently. For example, SocialSearchBrowser, a social networking application, chunks their information by temporal …