Mobile Lexicography: A Survey of the Mobile User Situation

Users are already mobile, but the question is to which extent knowledge-based dictionary apps are designed for the mobile user situation. The objective of this article is to analyse the characteristics of the mobile user situation and to look further into the stationary user situation and the mobile user situation. The analysis is based on an empirical survey involving ten medical doctors and a monolingual app designed to support cognitive lexicographic functions, cf. (Tarp 2006:61-64). In test A the doctors looked up five medical terms while sitting down at a desk and in test B the doctors looked up the same five medical terms while walking around a hospital bed. The data collected during the two tests include external and internal recordings, think-aloud data and interview data. The data were analysed by means of the information scientific star model, cf. (Simonsen 2011:565), and it was found that the information access success of the mobile user situation is lower than that of the stationary user situation, primarily because users navigate in the physical world and in the mobile device at the same time. The data also suggest that the mobile user situation is not fully compatible with for example knowledge acquisition.