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

2. 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?

3. 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?

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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?

7. 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?

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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.

12. MeSHBrowse for Categories

13. Web Categories

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

15. 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?

16. Scatter/Gather result clustering

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

18. 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?

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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?

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

23. 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?

24. Step right up & pick your terms!

25. 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?

26. GUIs inside the documents

27. Categories and Outlines

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

29. Break

30. 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)?

31. 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

32. 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