Casual-Leisure Search - Enterprise Search London Meetup

Casual-Leisure Searching
The Exploratory Search scenarios that
break our current models

Max L. Wilson
@ the Enterprise Search Meetup
1st Dec 2010

Max L. Wilson csmax@swan.ac.uk
Monday, 6 December 2010

To come...

• a bit of background

• brief overview of 2 recent studies

• what doesn’t ﬁt into our Exploratory Search models

•a deﬁnition of casual-leisure search we are working on


Context on Me
• Academic - a Lecturer in
Human-Computer Interaction

• MEng and PhD at University of
Southampton

• Research:
- Information Seeking & Retrieval
- Human Computer Interaction
- (Future) Web Technologies
- Social Media

Max L. Wilson m.l.wilson@swansea.ac.uk
csmax@swan.ac.uk

Alternative Forms of Search
What am I Does the What words
looking for? site have it? should I use?

White, R. W., Kules, B., Drucker, S. M., and schraefel, m. c. (2006). Introduction.
Communications of the ACM, 49(4):36–39.

csmax@swan.ac.uk

Additional Faceted Features
• preview cues

• order of facets
(like iTunes)

• moveable
facets

• backward
highlighting

• multiple
selection

Like iTunes

csmax@swan.ac.uk

Additional Faceted Features
• moveable
facets

• order of facets
(like iTunes)

• preview cues

• backward
highlighting

• multiple
selection

In some of my other work

Bates, M. J. (1979a). Idea tactics. Journal of
the American Society for Information
Belkin, N. J., Marchetti, P. G., and Cool, C. Science, 30(5):280–289.
(1993). Braque: design of an interface to support
user interaction in information retrieval. Bates, M. J. (1979b). Information search
Information Processing and Management, 29(3): tactics. Journal of the American Society for
325–344. Information Science, 30(4):205–214.

csmax@swan.ac.uk

In some of my other work

Wilson, M. L., schraefel, m. c., and White, R. W. (2009). Evaluating advanced
search interfaces using established information-seeking models. Journal of the
American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(7):1407–1422.

csmax@swan.ac.uk

Come and Sii what I’ve built

http://mspace.fm/sii
csmax@swan.ac.uk

1)

2)

3)

csmax@swan.ac.uk

Exploratory Search

Marchionini, G. (2006). Exploratory search: from ﬁnding to understanding.
Communications of the ACM, 49(4):41–46.
csmax@swan.ac.uk

Ben Shneiderman added...

• Multi-session searches

• Life long learning

• Completeness searches

• Low result availability

Shneiderman, B. HCIR2009 Keynote: The Future of Information Discovery

csmax@swan.ac.uk

Information Seeking

csmax@swan.ac.uk

2 Studies

csmax@swan.ac.uk

David Elsweiler
Erlangen University in Nuremberg


A Overview (81)
A1 Channel Hopping 4
A2 Programme List 5
A3 A list of programmes, restricted

72

B Looking for Information (71)
B.1 “Programme-related

B.2 Non-programme-related

C Looking for something to watch (195)

Figure 2: The Aﬃnity Diagramming Process
C.2 By genre/type

Entertaining/relaxing/distracting/thrilling
Funny programme
Music programme
Sport related 111
C.3 Film 7

D High-level needs 6

E Other television functions and nonsense 25

F Not enough information to classify 2

Figure 4: The Coding Scheme Developed for
Figure 3: The Categorising and Naming Phase
Recorded Needs

Max L. Wilson against which responses could be coded mutu-
ﬁxed scheme
csmax@swan.ac.uk
Monday, 6 December 2010 the results) and some of these criteria were quite unusual

Entertaining/relaxing/distracting/thrilling
Funny programme
Music programme
Sport related 111
C.3 Film 7

D High-level needs 6

E Other television functions and nonsense 25
Need: [I want an] entertaining programme, something funny,
to distract me
east Reason: Stressful day!
has Need: [I want] something interesting, distracting, informative,
F Not enough information totravel report or history programme
cultured such as a classify 2
hted Reason: I need to iron and at the same time i like to watch tv -
are it takes my mind off the chore
low, Figure 4: Stressful day!
Reason: The Coding Scheme Developed for
tud- Need: [I’m looking for] short entertainment during dinner
Recorded Needs
Reason: [I have a] little time to waste
arch Need: Channel hopping
tu- Reason: I’m bored
the results) and some of these criteria were quite unusual
ich and would be very difficult to achieve with existing systems,
BE- for example those shownentries where the information
for Table 2: Example
in Table 1.
gin need is secondary to the experience of searching.
ng a
thMax L. Wilson Need: [I would like] a list of society critical films, ordered by csmax@swan.ac.uk
ro- 6 December 2010
Monday, topic

Interesting Examples

csmax@swan.ac.uk

de-
s of
ind 4. HARVESTING REAL SEARCH TASKS

med?
ries

now

en-
) a
lex

on-
aw
sh-
ide
on-
und
in- L. Wilson
Max csmax@swan.ac.uk
na- Figure 1: Example tweets about real information

The Full Study

•5 Months

• Hourly Queries

• 12 Terms (past/present/future tense)

• Collected 100 latest Queries/Authors/DateTime

• 800MB of Tweets

• Thats 2.4M unique tweets from 1.7M unique users
csmax@swan.ac.uk

Analysis
- Grounded Theory
- Inductive Coding

csmax@swan.ac.uk

Our
Taxonomy
in Progress

csmax@swan.ac.uk

Discover other new scenarios
The pattern for what?

Dimension 1

Dimension 2

Dimension 3

Dimension 4

Dimension 5

csmax@swan.ac.uk

Discover other new scenarios
Pattern for Casual-Leisure

Dimension 1

Dimension 2

Dimension 3

Dimension 4

Dimension 5

csmax@swan.ac.uk

D
behaviours documented so far.
4.1 Need-less browsing d

Casual Leisure Examples
Much like the desire to pass time at the television, we saw
many examples (some shown in Table 3) of people passing
a

time typically associated with the ‘browsing’ keyword. 5
h
1) ... I’m not even *doing* anything useful... just browsing
eBay aimlessly...
f
2) to do list today: browse the Internet until fasting break o
time.. S
3) ... just got done eating dinner and my family is watch-
ing the football. Rather browse on the laptop
i
4) I’m at the dolphin mall. Just browsing. b
a
Table 3: Example tweets where the browsing activ- d
ity is need-less. f
t
From the collected tweets it is clear that often the inform- s
ation-need in these situations are not only fuzzy, but typi- W
cally absent. The aim appears to be focused on the activity, t
where the measure of success would be in how much csmax@swan.ac.uk
Max L. Wilson they

curtail exploration when it is not appropriate.
4.2 Exploring for the experience
are we covering these?
Mostly related to the exploration of a novel physical space,
we saw many people exploring with family and friends. The
aim in these situations (see Table 5) is often not to find
specific places, but to spend time with family.
1) exploring the neighbourhood with my baby!
2) What a beautiful day to be outside playing and explor-
ing with the kids:)
3) Into the nineties and exploring dubstep [music] while
handling lots of small to-dos

Table 5: Example tweets where the experience out-
weighs the things found.

In these cases, the goal may be to investigate or learn
about the place, but the the focus of the activity is less
on the specific knowledge gained than on the experience it-
Max L. Wilson Another point of note is that in these situations csmax@swan.ac.uk
self. people

Back to Exploratory Search

•Unfamiliar Domain

•Unfamiliar Systems

•Unfamiliar information need

TV
example
•Unfamiliar Domain



TV
example
•Unfamiliar Domain X


TV
example
•Unfamiliar Systems X

TV
example
•Unfamiliar information need X

TV eBay
example example

TV eBay
example example
•Unfamiliar Domain X X

TV eBay
example example
•Unfamiliar Systems X X

TV eBay
example example
•Unfamiliar Systems X X
•Unfamiliar information need X X

Casual-Leisure Search
(Deﬁnition v0.1)

• the information found is secondary to the experience

• success != ﬁnding something

• usually - the motivators are hedonistic

• an information need is often absent


Casual-Leisure Search - A New Model
In forthcoming book ‘New Directions in Information Behaviour’
Edited by Spink et al


Is this important?

• They are often lengthy, aimless, and very exploratory

• Technology is increasingly pervasive - casual-leisure
search is on the increase

• These searches are often linked to health and well-being


Is it important?

• It impacts the way we might evaluate exploratory search

• It impacts the way we might measure success

• We will struggle to design good exploratory
systems if we focus on building knowledge and forget these
casual search scenarios


• now think about the design of amazon

• now think about the design of ebay...

• now think about the design of wikipedia...


On-going Work

• Pilot studies

• Comparison of leisure and work queries in wikipedia

• Analysis of 2-days self-directed user logs


Questions


Casual-Leisure Search - Enterprise Search London Meetup

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