Taking the Initiative with Extempore: Exploring Out-of-Turn Interactions with Websites

Abstract

We present the first study to explore the use of out-of-turn interaction in websites. Out-of-turn interaction is a technique which empowers the user to supply unsolicited information while browsing. This approach helps flexibly bridge any mental mismatch between the user and the website, in a manner fundamentally different from faceted browsing and site-specific search tools. We built a user interface (Extempore) which accepts out-of-turn input via voice or text; and employed it in a US congressional website, to determine if users utilize out-of-turn interaction for information-finding tasks, and their rationale for doing so. The results indicate that users are adept at discerning when out-of-turn interaction is necessary in a particular task, and actively interleaved it with browsing. However, users found cascading information across information-finding subtasks challenging. Therefore, this work not only improves our understanding of out-of-turn interaction, but also suggests further opportunities to enrich browsing experiences for users.