User Interfaces

1
User Interfaces IR

• Readings Review
• 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

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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

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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?

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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
• Whats a measure of a good system?
• More use or less use?
• When is a task complete?

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Modes Moves Tasks Checklist

• Interfaces for each box in the model
• Support transitions with a consistent GUI

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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

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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

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Lexis-Nexis getting started
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MeSHBrowse for Categories
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Web Categories
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Drill down selection in a GUI
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We know whats good for you GUI
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Scatter/Gather result clustering
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Overly Visual Clustering?

• What does this mean?
• Is it better to examine the peaks or the valleys?
• Which is the best answer?

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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, wheres the legend?

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GUIs are good for users

• But lets 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 Raskins Human Interface

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Friendly help

• Examples
• 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

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Query interfaces

• What do we all use?
• 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?

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Queries go GUI

• Venn diagrams best?
• Changes in the document set?
• Were 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?

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Step right up pick your terms!
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GUIs are good for basic search

• What about advanced searching?
• GUI defaults?
• Custom colors, sizes, datasets?
• Whats a good GUI for Natural Language Queries?
• AskJeeves
• ChatBot, Google SMS
• What about multiple, equal document hits?

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GUIs inside the documents
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Categories and Outlines
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WebMate HomeFinder

• For beginning users?
• For advanced users?
• Over time, to follow up on topics?

29
Break
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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
• 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