Inspection Mechanisms for Community-based Content Discovery in Microblogs.

Abstract

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 rank-ing of tweets. It aims to improving content discovery, while maintaining content relevance and sense of user control. Par-ticipants 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 com-munities, and a more fine-grained functionality for saving in-dividual ‘favorite ’ users. Users also highlighted unanticipated uses of the interface such as iteratively discovering new com-munities to follow, and organizing events. Informed by these studies, we propose improvements and a mock-up for an in-terface to be used for future larger scale experiments for ex-ploring microblog content.