Showing-Displays-Together: A Co-located Web Search Support Exploiting the Terminal Orientation

Today, people perform web search tasks with smartphones on a daily basis, forming a group of several users to achieve a common goal, such as finding a good restaurant and deciding a product to buy. During such a task, they naturally show the smartphone screen to share the displayed information, Showing-Displays-Together, after personally performing a web search. If the functions of a tool to support the collaborative web search could be automatically switched, users would be able perform their task more smoothly. In this paper, we propose a function to compare shared web pages among users, which is automatically invoked by exploiting the terminal orientation. We have developed a collaborative web search support tool which has three functions switched each other according to the terminal orientation, searching personally in portrait mode, browsing a shared favorites list in landscape mode, and comparing web pages in horizontal mode. The result of evaluation shows that user satisfaction, communication, and easiness in making a decision had a good impact on the tasks, but usability needed to be improved to avoid unintentional switching of the functions to users.