Jaime Teevan MIT, CSAIL

Re-finding! Jaime Teevan MIT, CSAIL

HCI at MIT • HCI Seminar • Fridays at 1:30 pm • URL: http://www.csail.mit.edu/events • Announcement mailing list • Applying HCI to non-HCI problems • Security • Robotics • Information retrieval

D E I Iterative Design Process Design Evaluation Implementation Helping People Return to Information

D E I Iterative Design Process Model magic Re-finding magic Evaluate current tools Paper prototype Storyboard Magic works!

D E I Helping People Re-find Model magic Re-finding magic Evaluate current tools Paper prototype Storyboard Magic works!

Naturalistic Study of Current Tools • Subjects: 15 CS graduate students • Modified Diary Study • Ten interviews each • Asked about what they had just done • 2 interviews a day • Collected over 5 days

Let Me Interview You! • Email: • What’s the last email you read? What did you do with it? • Have you gone back to an email you’ve read before? • Web: • What’s the last Web page you visited? How did you get there? • Have you looked for anything on the Web? • Files: • What’s the last file you looked at? How did you get to it? • Have you looked for a file?

Interview Questions • Two question types • Last email/file/Web page looked at • Last email/file/Web page looked for • Qualitative data • Advantages • Naturalistic, exploratory • Gives a rich understanding • Can be coded  quantitative • Drawbacks • Overwhelming!

Directed Search Today • Target: Connie Monroe’s office number  Type into a search engine: “Connie Monroe, office number”

What We Observed Interviewer: Have you looked for anything on the Web today? Jim: I had to look for the office number of the Harvard professor. I: So how did you go about doing that? J: I went to the homepage of the Math department at Harvard

What We Observed I:So you went to the Math department, and then what did you do over there? J:It had a place where you can find people and I went to that page and they had a dropdown list of visiting faculty, and so I went to that link and I looked for her name and there it was.

What We Observed J:I knew that she had a very small Web page saying, “I’m here at Harvard. Here’s my contact information.”

Strategies for Finding Teleporting Orienteering

Why Do People Orienteer? • Easier than saying what you want • You know where you are • You know what you find • The tools don’t work

Easier Than Saying What You Want • Describing the target is hard • Can’t • Prefer not to • Habit • “Whicheverway Iremember first.” • Search for source • E.g., Your last email search

You Know Where You Are • Stay in known space • URL manipulation • Bookmarks • History • Backtracking • Following an information scent • Never end up at a dead end

You Know What You Find • Context gives understanding of answer “I waslooking for a specific file. But even when I saw its name, I wouldn’t have known that that was the file I wanted until I saw all of the other names in the same directory…” • Understanding negative results “I basically clicked on every single button until I was convinced… I don’t think that it exists…”

Structural Consistency Important All must be the same to re-find the information! New name

“Pick a card, any card.”

Abracadabra!

Magic…

People Forget a Lot

Absolute Consistency Unnecessary New name Focus on search result lists

Re:Search Engine ?

Merge Old and New Results Old Merged New

Memory Study • Participants issued self-selected query • After an hour, asked to fill out a survey • 100+ participants

Query Changes • Most changes are simple • Capitalization • Phrasing • Word ordering • Word form • New queries shorter • What about longer time horizons? • Recognition v. recall

Memorability a Function of Rank

Remembered Results Ranked High

Thank you! Jaime Teevan teevan@mit.edu

Jaime Teevan MIT, CSAIL