User Interfaces & IR Readings Review - Googling Further - HomeFinder Live Demos!

Searching for images Feature detection for images is difficult - Image formats - Image content - Disagreement on classification of images Apple, Chair, Football game, Beautiful How does image search work now? - Text near the graphic on a Web page -ALT tag -file name - Advanced searching Advanced searching Intitle, inurl, filetype, related, color Best news: you can see your results

Image Search in Context We’re used to seeing associated images - Why would be be searching for an image? - Clip art, reference, learning? - Images as additional context - News News - eCommerce eCommerce - Books Books - clarification or verification Some searching is focused on images - Maps - Paths, location & context

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?

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 What about non-text documents ?

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 How do you get started with images, audio or video?

Lexis-Nexis getting started

MeSHBrowse for Categories

Web Categories

Drill down selection in a GUI

“We know what’s best” GUI How well does “one size fits all” work? - Speed & efficiency - Usability & findability Searching the same way for anything? Results the same way for everything?

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.” Jef Raskin- The Humane Interface

Friendly help Examples - 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? - 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 (complex) documents

Categories and Outlines

HomeFinder

HomeFinder issues Dynamic queries are the key - But, for beginning or advanced users? - What if you don’t know the area? Understanding trends & exceptions - For a small amount of data - Over time, to follow up on topics? Would a Maps mashup be better?mashup - Do it yourself Do it yourself - More data to merge together than one housing database = more options to display (& confuse)

Project Ideas Searchable Personal Digital Library - Design & deploy search over content Browser hacks for searching - Greasemonkey (javascript) Firefox keeps all the pages you surf so you can search through them later - Firefox hack Historical review of interfaces for search - Text, multimedia, etc.

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