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
Iterative Design Process
Design D
Evaluation
E
I
Implementation
Helping People Return to Information
Iterative Design Process
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
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:
the last email you read? What did you do with it? –Have you gone back to an email you’ve read before?
–What’s
♠ 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?
♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ The tools don’t work Easier than saying what you want You know where you are You know what you find
Easier Than Saying What You Want
♠ Describing the target is hard
♥ Can’t ♥ Prefer not to
♠ Habit
♥ “Whichever way I remember 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 was looking 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…”
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Structural Consistency Important
All must be the same to re-find the information!
New name
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
“Pick a card, any card.”
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
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
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
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Helping People Re-find
Model magic Re-finding magic D
Evaluate current tools
E
I
Paper prototype
Magic works!
Storyboard
Jaime Teevan teevan@mit.edu