Andrea Richeson

Week 5 – (Feb 23, 2009) Analysis – User Modeling, Browsing and Searching Primary Readings

Rosenfeld, Information Architecture: Chapter 7 (Navigation Systems) and 8 (Search Systems)

• Navigation adds windows and doors to the site.
• UX Design includes IA + IXD + Info Design + Visual Design + UX Engineering (collaborative design across disciplines works best — with experts blurring the lines between disciplines)
• Note the flashback reference to Gopher (strict hierarchical navigation which limited flexibility)
• Note that frames violate the page paradigm.. bad for usability, accessibility
• Navigation needs to: Balance context & flexibility
• Consists of Global, Local and Contextual navigation + supplemental nav tools such as sitemaps, indexes, guides, wizards, configurators
• Newer tools include personalization, visualization, tag clouds, collaborative filtering, and social navigation

Issues to consider when implementing search: Sear is not an IT thing. It needs to managed as an information problem — not a technical problem.

• Does the site need a search tool?
• The anatomy of a search engine.
• What should be searchable?
• Note retrieval algorithms.
  • Pattern Matching: compare search string to index of content
    • Recall: # relevant docs retrieved/#relevant docs in the collection
      • automatic stemming: expand search term to include other terms with same root (stem)..for higher recall
    • Precision: # relevantdocs retreived/# total docs in collection
      • Search using meta data results in higher precision
    • These terms are inversely related… can’t have your recall and precision too
    • Document Matching: using a good doc as the basis for additional searches
      • Returning docs with similar meta data
      • Collaborative filtering and citation search
• Query Builders: spell-checkers, phonetic tools, stemming tools, natural language processing, controlled vocabulary and thesauri
• Careful how you present search results.
  • display less for people who know what they want; more for people who aren’t sure.
• Consider the design of the search interface: level of search expertise, type of info need, type of info being searched, amount of info being searched. Surprising note in the book: Just say no to advanced seearch — it isn’t used much, so low ROI.

Choo, C. W., Detlor, B., & Turnbull, D. (2000). Information Seeking on the Web: An Integrated Model of Browsing and Searching. First Monday, 5(2).

• Browser capabilities & other tech environment issues have a huge impact on usage patterns
• Motivations and search tactics are related
• Searching incorporates multiple, complementary methods of collecting quantitative and qualitative data

Tauscher, L. M., & Greenberg, S. (1997). Revisitation patterns in World Wide Web navigation. Paper presented at the ACM SIGCHI ‘97, Atlanta, GA.

• Designing history mechanisms in browsers — using empirical data as a foundation
• Showing the last few recently visited URLs with dupes removed is helpful. Most browsing is to previously viewed pages (58%)

Secondary Readings
Bates, M. After the dot-bomb: Getting Information Retrieval Right This Time. First Monday. 2002.

Kobayashi, M., & Takeda, K. (2000). Information Retrieval on the Web. ACM Computing Surveys, 32(2).

Maglio, P., & Barrett, R. (1996). How to Build Modeling Agents to Support Web Searchers. Paper presented at the Sixth Internation Conference on User Modeling, New York.

Hearst, M. (2000). Next Generation Web Search: Setting Our Sites. Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering