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Surviving the Information Explosion

Learn about the challenges of surviving the information explosion and how Haystack provides a personal information storage solution. Explore our user study results, future work, and how Haystack can help you manage web pages, emails, files, and more.

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Surviving the Information Explosion

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  1. Surviving the Information Explosion Christine Alvarado and Jaime Teevan

  2. Overview • Motivation • Background • Our study • Preliminary results • Future work

  3. Let Us 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? • Files: • What’s the last file you looked at? How did you get to it? • Have you searched for a file? • Web: • What’s the last Web page you visited? How did you get there? • Have you searched for anything on the Web?

  4. The Information Explosion You must extract information from: • 1.6 billion web pages [Google] • Dozens of incoming emails daily • Hundreds of files on your personal computer

  5. Limited Organizational Tools

  6. Limited Organizational Tools • Many separate tools • Limited organizational support • Organizational burden on user • Information overwhelms tools

  7. Haystack Haystack:Personal Information Storage Web pages Email Files Calendar Contacts

  8. Haystack:Personal Information Storage What was that paper I read last week about Information Retrieval? Haystack

  9. Haystack:Personal Information Storage Ah yes! Thank you. Haystack

  10. User Interface Microsoft Outlook Pine

  11. Search Frequency Type Organization Patterns Use RATIONALE User Study: Goals

  12. Pre-Study [Summer 2001]Setup • 6 subjects • Observed/recorded working for 1-2 hours • Follow-up interview

  13. Pre-studyAreas to Explore • Window placement • Desktop organization • Context switches • Navigation • Searches

  14. Previous Work • Paper documents • [Malone, 1983], [Whittaker & Hirshberg, 2001] • Files • [Barreau & Nardi, 1995] • Web (bookmarks) • [Abrams, 1998] • Email/Calendar • [Whittaker & Snider, 1996], [Bellotti & Smith, 2000]

  15. Whittaker and Hirshberg, 2001 • Method • Web survey, 50 AT&T employees • Follow-up interview, 14 employees • Goal • Determine attitudes toward paper information organization • Results • Obsolescence • Uniqueness • Filers vs. Pilers

  16. Method • Subjects • 15 MIT CS graduate students (5 women, 10 men) • Setup • 10 short interviews (~ 5 min.) • 1 long interview (~ 45 min.) • Topics • Web, Email, Files

  17. Short Interviews • 2 question types • What was the last email/file/web page you looked at? • Did you search for any email/file/web page? • Goal: Discover patterns in searching and browsing

  18. Long Interviews • “Guided tour” of subject’s bookmarks, email, and file system • Goals: • Discover organizational patterns • Relate organization to search/browse behavior • Discover problems in organizational structure

  19. Remember Your Answers? • Results based on 85 short interviews • Getting to a Web page • Using a bookmark: 57% of accesses • Typing a URL: 20% of accesses • 19% of above followed links from there • 3 out of 13 Web searches are for information that the user has seen before • 64% of searched for email is found in the user’s Inbox

  20. Results • Quantitative • Numbers, counts • Reproducible • Qualitative • Anecdotes • Building hypotheses • Categorization of behaviors

  21. Search: Preliminary Results • Different types of searches • Directory lookup • Confirming information exists • Finding a specific piece of information (QA) • Learning about a topic (Browse) • Cross type searches • Interactions with people • Searching heavily relied on, very successful

  22. Search: Future Work • Causes of failure • Previously viewed information • Additional cues used for retrieval • Function of browsing during search

  23. Organization: Future Work • Consistency of organization across types • Context used in organization • Organization’s effect on search

  24. Haystack: Applying What We Learn • Verify our conclusions • Boundaries between information types • Automation versus support • Interaction between search and browsing

  25. Questions? Contact us with comments: - calvarad@ai.mit.edu - teevan@ai.mit.edu To learn more about Haystack: http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu

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