Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (18)
Similar to An HCI-design research approach to search
Similar to An HCI-design research approach to search (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
An HCI-design research approach to search
- 1. Searching Your Own Braina HCI-design research approach to search Sean Connolly December 1, 2009
- 2. James.Daedalusa new search interaction hot dog pirate ninjas del.icio.us SEO Easter bunny information millions HCI design thinking CHI C3 Sean Connolly December 1, 2009 search evaluation enterprises apple heuristics algorithm
- 5. “Based on our field studies, we dug more deeply into how people were actually using our Advanced Search page, and quickly discovered that, indeed, a large number of users were going to the page, and then leaving it without ever filling in any of the slots.” - Dan Russell, Google, Senior Research Scientist in Search Quality
- 6. Exploratory Search White & Marchioni When users do not receive the information they were looking for in response to a query, they exhibit the following responses: … scan results page for keywords … scan urls for pate information … iterate search This is the user feedback loop!
- 17. Johari window
- 22. Search as Best Friend “[The] ideal search engine? Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know. That search engine could tailor answers to you based on your preferences, your existing knowledge and the best available information; it could ask for clarification and present the answers in whatever setting or media worked best.” - Marissa Mayer, Google, VP Search Product and User Experience
- 23. Search as Understanding Meaning “Google needs to move “from words to meaning.” In other words, Google needs to understand queries better, and return results that best match the real meaning of a query. “We have to get from the sort of casual use of asking, querying…to “what did you mean?”” - Eric Schmit, Google, CEO
- 24. Search Interacts Direct With Brain “Sergey argues that the correct thing to do is to just connect it straight to your brain. In other words, you know, wire it into your head.” - Eric Schmit, Google, CEO speaking of a conversation with Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google
- 25. James.Daedalus This project grew out of navigation tool was imagined to help solve a problem for a social database the C3 enterprises designed and developed with tags and searching. Because the interaction helped navigate user generated tags, it generalized perfectly to search engine technology.
- 26. James.Daedalusa new search interaction Sean Connolly December 1, 2009
Editor's Notes
- Search algorithms are a wonderful thing. But sometimes search is frustrating. Why is it frustrating? Well, it’s frustrating because it didn’t work. What does that mean, “didn’t work?” It “worked,” didn’t it? The algorithm gave you an answer. But it didn’t give you “the right” answer, you say. That was the problem. But what is “the right” answer?
- [start animation]Just stuff. You want information. This is the time for information overload. When the user is in the presence of an uncertain decision, the user needs more information. And I say, more ways to interact with it. See, search algorithms are awesome. They parse text documents as just bags-of-words, with no meaning to be made between them. Each word is a distinct object. Now when it matches your query up with all the documents out there on the internet well…It gets a lot of words in return!
- “Advanced Search” pages. Ask Jeeves has one.
- Yahoo’s got ‘em . You Tube’s got ‘em. Google’s got ‘em. Actually, to be fair, Google now has this one. But this (right picture), was Google answer to what happens when a user is frustrated by search not even a year ago. Google made the switch from this (right) to this (left).It is an improvement. It is a thoughtful reduction of the form. But it’s not a transformative answer. It’s not a disruptive answer to “what happens when the user is frustrated by search?”But it is functional. Narrowing down your search with these tools can help improve your search results. But here’s the major problem… [To be even more fair, the way search engines run and refine algorithms is their best answer to “what happens when a user is a frustrated by search,” and we only have them to thank for products like the one I am about to display.]
- People don’t use it. What’s nice about me is that I am, amongst other things, a practicing usability specialist in the User Experience lab at UITS, the IT department for the statewide network of Indiana Universities. In this capacity I run usability tests on web interfaces as a profession. I am well versed in web standards and I can tell you that Google did an excellent job of revising their Advanced Search Page according to good current principles. But something is lacking. Even though it would help people to refine searches in this manner, they don’t user it. What do users do when they have a search that frustrates them, they do what you do.
- They look for keywords in the response results. Then, they refine their query in the search bar, using the information obtained through this analysis.Ryen White, at Microsoft Research, has labeled this type of user behavior “exploratory search.” Users analyze the search results pages for information, and then enter that information into the query bar and run again. Therefore, the behavior we seek to create with our search interaction, James.Daedalus, already maps to the behaviors users already express.But I ask, if the computer knows better which words in the bag-of-words problem it’s confusing anyway, why doesn’t it tell me? And why does it make go to an Advanced Search page for help?(This is a query a ran looking for a paper while working on this very project. I was talking to my information visualization professor at the ‘water cooler’ and he said, for this project, I needed to read Ed Chi, Peter Pirolli, and James Pitkow’s paper on “Information Scent.”)
- First we make sure we can obtain meaningful information from the algorithm. We can, as evidenced by this popular browser plug-in ‘Search Cloudlet’ (perhaps they would be eager to find a monetization schema for their information). The search interaction would be built around these *actual* *search impacting* words.
- [Please forgive the axis labels. They should ignored on this older prototype.]If the user found words she knew did not apply, she could ‘click’ them so they would be taken out of the search. So let’s say I know I’m looking for a the well-known ‘Information Scent’ paper by Ed Chi, et al. I type in “chi” and “visualization.” But notice the problem I have with Ed’s last name, “Chi.”The “chi” of Ed Chi is not the same as the “chi” in “tai chi.” The browser plug-in lets me know with confidence that “tai” is one of the words impacting my search. Perhaps I could have dissected the search results page, and chosen this myself. But by revealing this information to the user, the user knows EXACTLY which words are the MOST impactful. And she can navigate more clearly. To stop “tai” from impacting my search results, then, I click on ‘tai’ and it disappears.[click powerpoint.]Like so.
- The search page of whichever search engine provides immediate feedback of the changed query. However – what about these problems? “Chi” is also, in addition to “tai chi”, just “chi”, the special type of energy used in martial arts. But I can’t take that out of my search. That “chi” is noise I will have to further look through. Furthermore, “CHI” is also the name of the Computer-Human-Interaction Conference at which this paper was published! Furthermore, we later find out that Ed Chi does in fact study martial arts, so even removing “martial arts” from a query might very well harm our query. That is a severe problem with current search. The user has to NOT an object when dismissing it’s important during search. We would like instead to marginalize the impact of impactful words in a search, by reweighting their value, making their IMPACT on the search zero, but not taking on a value of ZERO themselves. How do we do this? Well you push the words that relate to your idea to the center of the coordinate space if want to associate them (as Gestalt would suggest), and increase their impact on your search ( since you know these specific words impact it). Conversely as you pull words away from center, you marginalize the impact of that impacting key word. One imagines that as the user pushes more and more words away, more and more relevant keywords naturally emerge closer to center allowing the user to create her own, rich, INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT, which she can refine and explore in greater (and increasingly greater) detail. Now before asking anybody to code this poor thing, I wanted to make sure people could actually make sense of these floaty-keyword blobs that I was imaginging…
- So I made paper prototypes of the concrete words
- I didn’t in three different sizes to approximate the experience of one for the iPhone, one for a search engine on the computer, and one for a table top touch system,.
- Then I led users through a cognitive walkthrough, with the same search query you were shown above, and asked how they might use the jumble of words to “narrow a search.”Users found the interaction quite intuitive and were able to figure out (by the feedback in the display) that moving keywords to center reweighted important search words more heavily (thus leading to the object of their search), and that moving keywords to ‘outer’ shells marginalized the value of the keywords (and thus, did not impact their search).Users also discovered that since the
- Too make the interaction more manageable, instead of having entirely unordered, floating words, I used ‘shells’ to let the user more precisely visually choose how impactful she wanted a certain keyword to be. This interaction was built around the idea of creating FLOW to disrupt the frustration of failed search. By designing the interface around clear cognitive principles, we gain insight to an approach to the audience that should be intuitive. It is. It expresses clear goals to the audience (it at least gives them words to reweight, which are helpful even when simply browsing information absently), it provides immediate feedback (through the search engine results page), it provides the keyword for the user so they use the easier cognitive process of recognition – just recognizing concepts that relate – versus the harder cognitive process of recall –remembering from memory concepts that relate. It also leverages the fact that this is the behaviors users use when stumped by search currently. No new behavior is needed.
- However, now comes the tough part. We know the basic postulates work. But, if the center of the grid now means “importance,” we realize that keyword size need not refer to importance in the interface. Location alone achieves that. What can we do now with size? And what can we do with color? Now too, picture it again as a Christmas shopping tool. While you’re looking for your favorite designer, you notice other designers the algorithm finds related. You find baseball cards next to baseball bats and decide to purchase those too. You look for concepts the way your head looks for concepts – not by trying to figure out what search algoirthms mean… but by trying to refine what you want, by recognizing what you don’t.
- Quote: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/10/marissa-mayer-clarifies-search-is-only-10-done-not-90/Picture://www.giveupinternet.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/marissa-ann-mayer.jpg
- Quote: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/03/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-on-the-future-of-search-connect-it-straight-to-your-brain/Picture:http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2008/03/18/ericschmidt_wideweb__470x310,0.jpg
- Quote: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/03/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-on-the-future-of-search-connect-it-straight-to-your-brain/Picture:http://images.huffingtonpost.com/gen/25552/thumbs/s-SERGEY-BRIN-GOOGLE-large.jpg
- This interface, because it is not built, is sometimes hard to understand without the visual elements in motion to play with. But having had run this interaction past the toughest mathematic and data-retrieval people I know, this interaction should not only be able to be successfully developed, it should not actually be difficult at all. The business plan is better expressed in the questions already answered in the application. But I am serious about seeing this through. I am in Bloomington until May. And I only have 20 hours of commitment to my current job. I could leap at this, and see this through to successful completion. Much like the idea is hard to understand without the visuals, it is hard to invest in without the working prototype. But having had seen the reaction of many users, I am confident this simple tool (and the many extensions possible – for the xbox, for the iPhone, for searching information in any context) will quickly gain traction for its whimsy, playfulness, and usefulness in the most lucrative market in technology today.Search.Sean Connolly 310.801.7642 james.daedalus@gmail.com