Abstract
Festivals held in a city (or number of cities) contain many geographically distributed events often occurring contemporaneously. Visitors to the festival need to make numerous cognitively-challenging decisions about which events to see, and in which order. Consequently, the visitors' information interactions with online and mobile guides are likely to influence their experience of the festival. ...
Abstract
Festivals held in a city (or number of cities) contain many geographically distributed events often occurring contemporaneously. Visitors to the festival need to make numerous cognitively-challenging decisions about which events to see, and in which order. Consequently, the visitors' information interactions with online and mobile guides are likely to influence their experience of the festival. In this paper we investigate how such interactions with a mobile app, designed to provide visitors with information about the festival and to help them plan their itinerary, relate to their experience and how they participated in the festival. The app was deployed in a large-scale naturalistic study (n=1159). Our analysis reveals that different information interaction styles corresponded to itineraries with different properties. The results of a follow-up survey (n=59), completed by a sub-sample of these users, suggests that this is no coincidence. Analysing what people reported in terms of their desires for their evening reveals trends indicating that user groups who made use of the same interface features (i.e. search, browse or recommendation) had similar priorities when planning their evening and ended up visiting events that reflect those priorities. These findings suggest that users are able to adapt their interaction style to use the features most appropriate to their needs. We conclude by discussing what our findings mean in terms of the information behaviour literature and evaluating interactive information retrieval systems embedded in a real context.
Altmetric