Investigating the Usability of a Mobile App for Finding and Exploring Places and Events

In our two-step field study, we developed and evaluated mobEx, a mobile app for faceted exploration of social media data on Android phones. mobEx unifies the data sources of related commercial apps in the market by retrieving information from various providers. The goal of our study was to find out, if the subjects understood the metaphor of a time-wheel as novel user interface feature for finding and exploring places and events and how they use it. In addition, mobEx offers a grid-based navigation menu and a list-based navigation menu for exploring the data. Here, we were interested in gaining some qualitative insights about which type of navigation approach the users prefer when they can choose between them. In this paper, we present the design and a preliminary analysis of the results of our study