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

2. Feelings Conversing Sociability
Consider the Human
Feelings
Conversing
Sociability

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

4. Aesthetics Emotional Stages Flow
Feelings
Aesthetics
Emotional Stages
Flow

5. 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

7. 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

8. 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)

9. Feelings: The Importance of Flow

10. 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

11. 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

12. Conversing
People like to talk

13. 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?

14. We need a “cone of silence”

15. Alternative text entry
swype.com
Gesture search, Li 2010

16. 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

17. : Dialogue
SIRI came out of the DARPA CALO project

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

20. 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.

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

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

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

25. 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

26. Full text freely available at: http://searchuserinterfaces.com
Thank you!
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