Exploring spatially-aware cross-device interaction techniques for mobile collaborative sensemaking

The collaborative decision-making process is traditionally supported by multi-user interfaces, such as large multi-touch screens or interactive tabletops for accessing, relating and comparing different data sources. Since such multi-user interfaces are typically expensive and unavailable outside dedicated environments (e.g. labs, smart rooms), recent works have proposed “bring your own device” approaches that allow users to join their mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets) in an ad-hoc manner to temporarily create multi-user cross-device systems. Such approaches can be enabled by spatially-aware cross-device interactions that have only been explored for simple operations. We conducted a three-step research study involving a total number of 65 users in 18 groups, in order to propose a composition paradigm that offers three interaction techniques for performing more complex operations, such as forwarding to multiple devices queries or query results or aggregating and visualizing search results across device boundaries.