Designing Search for Humans Prof. Marti Hearst UC Berkeley Strata Conference 2012 searchuserinterfaces.com

Feelings Conversing Sociability Consider the Human Feelings Conversing Sociability

Shutterstock: http://www. faqs. org/photo-dict/phrase/3404/emoticons

Aesthetics Emotional Stages Flow Feelings Aesthetics Emotional Stages Flow

Feelings: The Importance of Aesthetics With an aesthetically pleasing design: People will enjoy working with it more People will persist searching longer People will choose it even if it is less efficient Nakarada-Kordic & Lobb, 2005, Ben-Basset et al. 2006, Parush et al. 1998, van der Heijden 2003

Feelings: The Importance of Aesthetics Small details matter A left hand side line vs. a box for ads The line integrates the results into the page Balancing white space with content Balancing font color, shape, and weight Hotchkiss 2007

Feelings Kuhlthau on informational AND emotional stages in search Uncertainty and apprehension Initiation Confusion, uncertainty, doubt, frustration Selection Exploration Optimism (after deciding) Formulation Confidence dawning * Collection Confidence growing Presentation Relief and satisfaction (or disappointment) (Assuming novice researchers engaged in challenging tasks)

Feelings: The Importance of Flow

Feelings: The Importance of Flow From Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1991). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. HarperCollins via Bederson, Interfaces for staying in the flow, ACM Ubiquity 5(7), 2004

Properties of Interfaces with Flow Inviting Supports interrupt-free engagement in the task No blockages Easy reversal of actions Next steps seem to suggest themselves Supplies guidance Task-specific Light weight

Conversing People like to talk

Recent Trends Phone-based devices widely used Naturally accepts spoken input Difficult to type on Touch screen interaction increasingly popular Also difficult to type on Speech recognition technology is improving Huge volumes of training data is now available What are the impediments?

We need a “cone of silence”

Alternative text entry swype.com Gesture search, Li 2010

Speaking leads to conversation People naturally prefer a give-and-take Dialogue is getting closer with a combination of Massive behavioral data Intense machine learning research Advanced user interface design Real-time contextual information

: Dialogue SIRI came out of the DARPA CALO project

Sociability People are Social; Computers are Lonely. Don’t Personalize Search, Socialize it!

Social Search Asking: Communicating directly with others. Implicit: Suggestions generated as a side-effect of search activity. Collaboration: Working with other people on a search task. Explicit: knowledge accumulates via the actions of many.

Social Search: Asking for Answers Asking experts in a social network Richardson and White, WWW 2011

Social Search: People Collaborating Pickens et al., SIGIR 2008

Social Search: People Collaborating Jetter et al., CHI 2011

Summary: Consider the Human Feelings Emotional responses to information seeking Aesthetics Flow Conversing Audio and video are the future People prefer a natural dialogue Sociability Search as a social and collaborative experience Turning to others for certain types of task Sharing information for next-generation knowledge management

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