Jaime Teevan MIT, CSAIL

HCI at MIT ♠HCI Seminar ♥Fridays at 1:30 pm ♥URL: ♥Announcement mailing list ♠Applying HCI to non-HCI problems ♥Security ♥Robotics ♥Information retrieval

Iterative Design Process D E I Design ImplementationEvaluation Helping People Return to Information

Iterative Design Process Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

♠Subjects: 15 CS graduate students ♠Modified Diary Study ♠Ten interviews each ♥Asked about what they had just done ♥2 interviews a day ♥Collected over 5 days Naturalistic Study of Current Tools

Let Me Interview You! ♠ – What’s the last you read? What did you do with it? – Have you gone back to an you’ve read before? – What’s the last Web page you visited? How did you get there? – Have you looked for anything on the Web? – What’s the last file you looked at? How did you get to it? – Have you looked for a file? ♠Web: ♠Files:

♠Two question types ♥Last /file/Web page looked at ♥Last /file/Web page looked for ♠Qualitative data ♥Advantages ♣Naturalistic, exploratory ♣Gives a rich understanding ♣Can be coded  quantitative ♥Drawbacks ♣Overwhelming! Interview Questions

Directed Search Today ♠Target: Connie Monroe’s office number  Type into a search engine: “Connie Monroe, office number”

What We Observed Interviewer: Have you looked for anything on the Web today? Jim: I had to look for the office number of the Harvard professor. I: So how did you go about doing that? J: I went to the homepage of the Math department at Harvard

What We Observed I: So you went to the Math department, and then what did you do over there? J: It had a place where you can find people and I went to that page and they had a dropdown list of visiting faculty, and so I went to that link and I looked for her name and there it was.

What We Observed J: I knew that she had a very small Web page saying, “I’m here at Harvard. Here’s my contact information.”

Teleporting Orienteering Strategies for Finding

Why Do People Orienteer? ♠Easier than saying what you want ♠You know where you are ♠You know what you find ♠The tools don’t work

Easier Than Saying What You Want ♠Describing the target is hard ♥Can’t ♥Prefer not to ♠Habit ♥“Whichever way I remember first.” ♠Search for source ♥E.g., Your last search

You Know Where You Are ♠Stay in known space ♥URL manipulation ♥Bookmarks ♥History ♠Backtracking ♥Following an information scent ♥Never end up at a dead end

You Know What You Find ♠Context gives understanding of answer “I was looking for a specific file. But even when I saw its name, I wouldn’t have known that that was the file I wanted until I saw all of the other names in the same directory…” ♠Understanding negative results “I basically clicked on every single button until I was convinced… I don’t think that it exists…”

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

All must be the same to re-find the information! Structural Consistency Important New name

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

“Pick a card, any card.”

Magic…

People Forget a Lot

Absolute Consistency Unnecessary New name Focus on search result lists

Re:Search Engine ?

Merge Old and New Results Old New Merged

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Memory Study ♠Participants issued self-selected query ♠After an hour, asked to fill out a survey ♠100+ participants

Query Changes ♠Most changes are simple ♥Capitalization ♥Phrasing ♥Word ordering ♥Word form ♥New queries shorter ♠What about longer time horizons? ♠Recognition v. recall

Memorability a Function of Rank

Remembered Results Ranked High

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Helping People Re-find Evaluate current tools Re-finding magic Paper prototype Magic works! Model magic Storyboard D E I

Jaime Teevan