User Interfaces & IR Readings Review Live Demos! Harman WebMate HomeFinder Live Demos! WIRED System Evaluations due in two weeks Papers and Projects

User Interfaces & Visualization “Communication between human information seekers and information retrieval systems” p 257 How should the UI help with the seeking goal? Often in very standardized ways With less (if any) mediation in the process People have more variance than systems IR systems can be fast, can their UI be better?

Principles of UI Design (& IR) Offer informative feedback How can you be satisfied unless you already know: The answer? Where the answer is? Comparisons to other searches? What others say or do? Permit easy undo Allow for backtracking (the Back button) Make mistakes easy to correct or recover from Typing? Clicking?

Principles of UI Design 2 Allow feedback control Expose the UI functionality Make functionality clear & distinct Reduce working memory load Show progress in task (results count, #s) Show context of task (keywords for editing) Support experts & novices Let user select the right interface Reveal UI & system functionality in phases Amount of information shown, preferred

What about Visualization? Interactive GUIs are a good start Graphical views of information can provide an overview Is a picture (of an action) worth 1000 words? Is a picture of a dataset? Graphics help with abstraction, how can they represent specifics? Visual metaphors may be one key Navigation as a mechanism for interpretation

Types of Visualization Interaction Windows, Icons, Menus & Pointers Desktops, dialogs & forms Colors & Highlighting Brushing and Linking Panning and Zooming Focus-plus context Magic Lens, Fisheye lens Is more interaction best?

How do you evaluate IR systems? Systems, Users & Documents Interactivity in the interface Differences in search tasks Search style behaviors Conceptual understanding of the interface Interpreting a new interface & interacting with new data at the same time Proficiency with the data or interface over time What’s a measure of a good system? More use or less use? When is a task complete? What about Data collection Indexing Recall, Precision, Relevance too?

Modes & Moves Tasks Checklist Log files cleaned and formatted Undirected Viewing: This is when users scan broadly. We can expect many instances of starting & chaining(identifying sources of interest & following links from these starting pages) in this phase. Conditioned Viewing:This is when users focus on pre-selected sources. We can expect many instances of browsing (scanning top level pages, site maps), differentiating (selecting useful pages, bookmarking, printing), and monitoring (receiving site updates or revisting sites of interest). Informal Search: This is when users conduct “good enough” searching. We can expect differentiating, monitoring, and extracting (systematically searching a site for specific info) to be typical. Formal Search: This is when users conduct systematic, more rigorous searches. We can expect primarily extracting operations with some complementary monitoring activity. Interfaces for each box in the model Support transitions with a consistent GUI

Web IR: Back to the Future Full text retrieval Interactive query refinement Search syntax improvements & capabilities Ranking (as opposed to “first hit”) End Users, not info professional searching More sources online GUIs for search interfaces GUIs for document viewing Jef Raskin likes first hit searching

How do users get started? Select from a set of data sources Sort and sift through document representations Default sets Do users understand the data sources? Habits from earlier searches Success or failure How can a good UI help? Lists Overviews Examples Automated source selection

Lexis-Nexis getting started Typical online systems such as LEXIS-NEXIS require users to begin any inquiry with a scan through a long list of source names and guess which ones will be of interest. Usually little information beyond the name of the collection is provided online for these sources (see Figure ). If the user is not satisfied with the results on one collection, they must reissue the query on another collection.

MeSHBrowse for Categories

Web Categories

Drill down selection in a GUI It’s like reading a sentence about growing complexity of a topic. Right to Left.

We know what’s good for you GUI Users don’t know what’s being searched over, how about a little selectivity for the user and from the vendor?

Scatter/Gather result clustering

Overly Visual Clustering? What does this mean? Is it better to examine the peaks or the valleys? Which is the best answer?

Feature maps for search Size & shape are doc frequency Color is theme Neighborhoods are semantic relations Cursor hover shows doc titles If this is a map, where’s the legend?

GUIs are good for users But let’s not go overboard. “Although intuitively appealing, graphical overviews of large document spaces have yet to be shown to be useful and understandable for users. In fact, evaluations that have been conducted so far provide negative evidence as to their usefulness.” See Jef Raskin’s Human Interface

Friendly help Examples Dialogs Wizards Document types “More like this” “Did you mean” Dialogs Step by step searching Feedback into the interface and system Wizards Interactive tutorials Guided tours Content tutorials and explanations? Metaphor problems

Query interfaces What do we all use? What do we really need? Command lines with typing Text based searching in a GUI world What do we really need? Search Syntax (with help) Typpo or Vocabularry help? What are the basic elements a search interface should have for a simple query What should an IR system support for queries?

Queries go GUI Venn diagrams best? Changes in the document set? We’re typing text, why not text? “Dialog” with users?

Learning from RDBMS Filter flow through attributes DBMS “knows” the parameter of the answers, so only lets you search over them Drill down search = browsing?

Step right up & pick your terms!

GUIs are good for basic search… What about advanced searching? GUI defaults? Custom colors, sizes, datasets? What’s a good GUI for Natural Language Queries? AskJeeves ChatBot, Google SMS What about multiple, equal document hits?

GUIs inside the documents

Categories and Outlines

WebMate & HomeFinder For beginning users? For advanced users? Over time, to follow up on topics?

Break

WIRED System Evaluations Install IR software Set up documents for indexing What types of documents Sizes, formats, time to index? Perform some searches Note search functionality Describe (screen shot?) interface for search Examine results Describe (screen shot?) results page/screen Rotate, use subset of documents Note differences in queries What model, index, system do you think the system uses (based on class discussions & readings)?

Project Ideas Searchable Personal Digital Library Browser hacks for searching Mozilla keeps all the pages you surf so you can search through them later Mozilla hack Local search engine first? UT Library sidebar for Mozilla/Firefox

Paper Ideas New datasets for IR Metadata and IR systems Search on the Desktop – issues, previous research and ideas Collaborative searching – advantages and potential, but what about privacy? Metadata and IR systems Accessibility and Search Interfaces Searching on Auction sites eCommerce searching