Jaime Teevan MIT CSAIL HCI at MIT HCI

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 Magic works! E I Paper prototype Storyboard

Helping People Re-find Model magic Re-finding magic D Evaluate current tools Magic works! E I Paper prototype 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: –What’s the last email you read? What did you do with it? –Have you gone back to an email you’ve read before? ♠ 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 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 Magic works! E I Paper prototype 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 Magic works! E I Paper prototype Storyboard

Helping People Re-find Model magic Re-finding magic D Evaluate current tools Magic works! E I Paper prototype 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 Magic works! E I Paper prototype Storyboard

Helping People Re-find Model magic Re-finding magic D Evaluate current tools Magic works! E I Paper prototype Storyboard

Helping People Re-find Model magic Re-finding magic D Evaluate current tools Magic works! E I Paper prototype Storyboard

Helping People Re-find Model magic Re-finding magic D Evaluate current tools Magic works! E I Paper prototype 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 Magic works! E I Paper prototype Storyboard

Helping People Re-find Model magic Re-finding magic D Evaluate current tools Magic works! E I Paper prototype Storyboard

Helping People Re-find Model magic Re-finding magic D Evaluate current tools Magic works! E I Paper prototype Storyboard

Jaime Teevan teevan@mit. edu