Enhancing User Experience with Information Retrieval Interfaces

1. Information Retrieval: Human-Computer Interfaces and Information Access Process

2. Introduction • Information seeking is an imprecise process. • Users have fuzzy understanding of how to achieve their goals • Users select among sources, formulate their queries, review search results, … • IR interfaces need to support this process • Differences in IR retrieval quality can be dwarfed by differences in interface quality

3. An Information Task • User explicitly or implicitly expresses information need to system • System locates information based on expression of need • System presents information to user • User interacts with information to solve task

4. Human-Computer Interaction • What makes an effective human-computer interface? • “Well designed, effective computer systems generate positive feelings of success, competence, mastery, and clarity in the user community. • When an interactive system is well-designed, the interface almost disappears, enabling users to concentrate on their work, exploration, or pleasure.” • (Ben Shneiderman)

5. One Set of Design Principles • HCI includes a number of lists of design principles (rules of thumb for good design) • Selecting list and principles is personal choice and context dependent. • Shneiderman’s set includes: • feedback • reversal of actions • Internal locus of control • reduce working memory load • alternative interfaces for novice and expert users

6. Offer Informative Feedback • Comes from early HCI models viewing user interaction as a two-way communication between user and system. • Information retrieval includes feedback on • relationship between query and documents retrieved, • relationships among retrieved documents, and • relationships between retrieved documents and metadata.

7. Reduce Working Memory Load • Don’t make users remember – they have enough to do already. • Information retrieval interfaces might: • Maintain a history of searches/interactions • Provide browsable information (collection list, index terms, thesaurus, …) • Make suggestions based on • user history, • knowledge of task, • knowledge of collection and retrieved documents.

8. Alternative Interfaces for Novice and Expert Users • The first time user, the casual user, and the regular user need different support. • Inverse relationship between ease-of-use and user’s control (e.g. specification of details of ranking approach) • Scaffolding used to support users moving between interfaces (the interfaces do not need to be independent)

9. Role of Visualization • Humans are highly attuned to images and visual information. • Data (scientific) visualization tends to use physical intuitions of users. • Information visualization of abstract concepts (e.g. document space) is more complex.

10. Information Visualization Techniques • Icons and color highlighting • Brushing and linking • Panning and zooming • Focus-plus-context • Magic lenses • Animation (trees and hierarchies)

11. Evaluating Interactive Systems • Empirical data involving human users is time consuming to gather and difficult to draw universal conclusions from. • Evaluation metrics for user interfaces • Time required to learn the system • Time to achieve goals on benchmark tasks • Error rates • Retention of the use of the interface over time • User satisfaction

12. Models of Interaction Information need Query • Traditional Model: • What is wrong? Send to System Reformulate Receive Results Evaluate Results No? Done? Yes Stop

13. Traditional Model of Interaction • This model assumes that • the user´s information need is static and • the information seeking process is one of successively refining a query the • ends when until the query retrieves all and only those documents relevant to the original information need.

14. Traditional Model of Interaction • In reality: • Users learn during search process. • Scanning/reading is interlaced with search. • Users browse/examine collection overviews. • User navigation makes near misses valuable.

15. More Realistic Model • Berry-Picking Model • Users’ information needs change as they read/learn. • As a result their queries change. • User needs are not satisfied by a single final set of documents • They are satisfied by selections of information found during the process. • The goal is not to generate a query that returns the right information, but for the user to see the right information.

16. Interfaces Support this Process • Given the berry-picking model, the interface should: • allow users to reassess their goals and adjust their search strategy accordingly. • support search strategies by making it easy to follow trails with unanticipated results. • support methods for monitoring the status of the current strategy in relation to the user’s current task and high-level goals. • Some techniques: scanning, querying, navigating, browsing...

17. Non-Search Parts of Process • Information seeking is only one part of users’ full information work process. • Users also read, annotate, and analyze documents. • One study found 80% of work to be: • Finding trends, • Making comparisons, • Aggregating information, • Identifying a critical subset, • Assessing, and • Interpreting.

18. Interfaces for More than Search • It is convenient to divide the access process into two main components: • search/retrieval • analysis/synthesis • Interfaces should allow tight integration of these two activities.

19. Early IR Interface Studies • Modern systems versus old systems. • Full text versus bibliographic citations. • Statistical rankings versus Boolean systems. • End users versus professional intermediaries. • Online collections versus separated collections. • Graphic displays versus text displays. • Despite these differences, some general information seeking strategies have been identified that seem to transfer across systems. • Some old problems were resolved but new problems were introduced.