Searching for Nigeria: A Framework for Barriers to Information Seeking

Mobile information seeking often involves search engines that are designed by Western cultures, but are used across the world. As we strive for a more global design, we have a need to evaluate the information seeking journey across different segments of the population in a structured and programmatic process. In this study we focus on qualitative insights from 84 participants to understand mobile information seeking patterns and barriers for users in Nigeria while developing a framework that can be used to assess information seeking across different regions. As this effort continues to evolve and scale, we can iterate on the framework with the intent of improving search engines for non-Western cultures. The framework has five domains: 1) Perception, 2) Infrastructure, 3) Input and output format, 4) Content and 5) Context.

• Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization