Improving Photo Retrieval in a User’s Browser History Maria Tobin Advisors: Aaron Cass and Chris Fernandes

Motivation Back button is inefficient History list is never used Faster to perform an online search again than to search locally (Milic-Frayling et al. 2004) Tools need to be improved! Examples… Change first 2 bullets to talk about main point to audience- don’t use them as reminders for me what to say Example : “Back button is inefficient” and explain what I mean when presenting Say now you will give examples of why history lists are bad…

Items have identical names In this example I looked at several pictures from one of our basketball games….I saw one picture that I wanted to go back and see but the album was pretty large so I didn’t want to look through all the pictures again….so I went to my history list and realized that since every picture had the same title tag, they also had (CLICK ARROW) identical names in this list So to make that a little bigger for you (CLICK ARROW)- all of these pictures have the exact same name so we have no way of finding the picture without clicking and loading them all Items have identical names

Title of page uses name of picture This example is better because the title tags on Flickr use the name of the picture given explicitly by the user when it is uploaded….so now when I look in the history list I can tell that these pictures are of rafael nadal….however, the problem with this is that a user, or multiple users can name several pictures the same name….so even though (CLICK ARROW) the title tag uses the name of the pictures, when you look at this list, (CLICK ARROW) all of these pictures look like the same but they are really 8 different pictures of nadal Title of page uses name of picture

Title of page uses picture ID Also with this method of using the name in the title, if the user does not explicitly name the picture, it is given a ID such as this one….so (CLICK ARROW) that ID is then used in the history list and even though all of the Ids are unique, we are still faced with the problem that we do not know what the pictures are by looking at the names in the history list So if I make this bigger for you, (CLICK ARROW) you can see that I have no way of knowing what these pictures are from the names Title of page uses picture ID

Shaun Kaaston and Saul Greenburg (2001) Make sure I say we are interested in finding out how a user thinks when trying to retrieve page from photo sharing site- as you have just seen- problems clear to understand -one history list prototype done by kaaston and greenburg tried to solve this problem of unclear names by using thumbnails so the user can just look at the picture to identify the page they are looking for -however they also realized that was not enough and they gave users numerous ways to search for the pages in attempt to match the way the user thinks of finding the page -by domain -by frequency -by title or keyword -by dog-eared (bookmarks) Shaun Kaaston and Saul Greenburg (2001)

Research Question When finding a previously viewed picture, what does the user think of first: What album did the picture come from? How recently was the picture viewed? So we took these questions and narrowed them down to a specific area of the history list- photo sharing sites….We are interested in how a user thinks when searching for a previously viewed photo in their history…. Do they initially think of the album that the picture was in? Or do they think of when the picture (I.e earlier today, yesterday, last week, last month etc.)

Evaluation Digit Recall Navigation Task Retrieval Task Recency Condition Album Condition

Navigation Task So in the first part of the study, that participants will be given a script at the bottom of the computer screen, which will take them, step by step, through the navigation…they will look at 60 pictures from 5 different albums for a total of 20 minutes….we will make these albums on Flickr to ensure there is no changes between participants….the instructions of the script will be very specific such as “Please click on the third picture on the first page of the ‘Best Beach Pictures’ album” So, since we are building our study using javascript, we will use a frames, or something similar to a frames, to keep these instructions at the bottom of the screen while the participants navigate in the top frame Also, to ensure participants are paying attention to the pictures and not just clicking through them, they will also be asked to write one sentence about what they see in each picture

Retrieval Task 2 photo albums of all the pictures they viewed in Navigation Task sorted by recency sorted by album Mention when start time when press go For the purpose of our study, in the retrieval task we will build a personal photo album, called MyAlbums, containing all of the pictures that the participants were told to view during the navigation in part 1

Recency: Does the user first think of when the picture was viewed? Mention time stops when press found it This is what the interface will look like….each page will be a simple 3x2 grid which maintains the original orientation of each picture……they will click the numbers on the bottom right corner to change pages or the “next” to go to the next page…. therefore there will be no scrolling in this album The subjects will be timed on how long it takes them, in seconds, to find each picture…..They will be given specific instructions on the computer screen for each picture to find…they will press the space bar to get to MyAlbums and start the timer….every time they click on a thumbnail, it will be zoomed in and have the options of “Go Back” or “Found it!” to click on….”go back” will just go back to the grid layout, “found it” will stop the timer So in attempt to answer our research question about how a user thinks (CLICK ARROW), our first condition will deal with if a user naturally thinks of the picture by when it was viewed….it will look identical to this and all of the pictures sorted by recency with the first picture being the most recently viewed Recency: Does the user first think of when the picture was viewed?

Album: Does the user first think of what album the picture was in? The second condition will be very similar except for one change- (CLICK ARROW) in this condition we want to see if a user naturally thinks of the picture in terms of the album it was in and therefore they are forced to search for the picture by the albums so they will have a pulldown menu with the names of the albums that they viewed in part 1 of the study that they have to select to search for the pictures – the default choice will be “none” with no pictures showing….the name of name of the album, when selected, will also appear across the top of the photos Album: Does the user first think of what album the picture was in?

2x2 Mixed Factors Design Total Participants Recency Condition Album Condition Digit Recall Digit Recall Recency Condition Album Condition

Estimated Time

Results Tie back to research question- this tells us that average user thinks more of what album pic comes from than when they saw pic Fonts of graph need to be enlarged Take out “CONDITION” Album not albums Don’t need to say we only looked at one condtion for each subject Get rid of 00 at beginning of sec Change title to AVERAGE RETRIEVAL TIME

Results (cont’d) Do average of differences instead of difference of averages Combine all pictures instead of separing pic 5, 10, 15 and do bar graph

Future Work Improve future history list designs for more natural mapping Collapse results of current history lists How does a user think when searching for a general page in the history list? In what situations may a user think in one way over another? Separate a user’s photo history from the history list