With the increasing importance of social media in people's lives, more mobile applications have incorporated features to support social networking activities. These applications enable communication between people, using features such as chatting and blogging. There is, however, little consideration of the collaboration between people during information seeking. Mobile applications should support the seeking, sharing, confirming, and validating of information systematically to help users complete their tasks and fulfill their information needs. To support information seeking, especially collaboratively as a group, there is a need to understand people's social interaction behavior. Using tourism as a domain, we conducted a diary study to look into tourists' social interaction during information seeking. Further, based on the diary study findings and current research, we describe a set of triggers that lead to collaboration for each step in the information-seeking process. Here we present the social collaboration patterns between tourists and the people around them. Further, based on a diary study and current research, we describe a set of triggers that lead to collaboration for each step in the BIG6 information-seeking process.

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Mobile tourism services have become an essential tool for supporting tourists around the world. Our research aims to identify desirable and undesirable features for mobile tourism services from the tourists' perspective. Focus group discussions and surveys were conducted to gather tourists' needs, exploring the problems faced. This paper presents our findings highlighting desirable design features being maps and transportation information, and unpopular features such as gaming activities. The results also reflect differences in preferences between business/leisure travelers and frequent/infrequent travelers. We believe results of our work are useful in providing design insights for mobile service providers when deciding on features to be included in tourist-friendly information-rich systems, and the types of services customized for specific tourist groups.

Purpose -The design of context-aware mobile applications can be improved through a clear and in-depth understanding of context and how it can be used to meet users' requirements. Using tourism as a case application, this paper aims to address the lack of understanding of context and tourists' goals. Design/methodology/approach -This is achieved through a literature review of existing research and focus groups to gather information needs for tasks commonly executed by tourists. Findings -This paper proposes the TILES (temporal, identity, location, environmental and social) model to define and classify five main contextual types, and properties associated with each type for tourism-related applications. The TILES model (with 32 factors) derived from the analysis of the literature review is refined through inputs from two focus groups to incorporate an additional ten factors.Research implications/limitations -The TILES model can be generalised to support domains other than tourism, such as medical and edutainment. Originality/value of paper -The model will help to achieve a better understanding of context, users' information needs and their goals. In addition, this work extends findings in the field of context-aware computing and information retrieval on mobile devices. Solution providers will also be able to adopt TILES as a framework for guiding the design of their context-aware mobile applications.