Entertainment on the go: finding things to do and see while visiting distributed events

Distributed events are collections of single events taking place within a small geographical area at approximately the same time, normally related to one given topic e.g. music, film, arts etc. There are usually a large number of events on offer and the times in which they can be visited are heavily constrained. Therefore the information seeking task of choosing the events to visit and in which order can be very difficult. In this paper we investigate, via 2 large-scale naturalistic studies (n=391 and n=740), how mobile applications can be designed to assist users in this task and how such applications are used. We present an application that allows users to search and browse the events on offer in a number of different ways including via personalised event recommendations. Logs were collected of user interactions with the system. The results of this log analysis in combination with 2 surveys show some surprising usage patterns and point to how such applications can better serve users' needs.