Tutorial: User Interfaces & Visualization for Information Access

1. Tutorial:User Interfaces & Visualization for Information Access Prof. Marti Hearst University of California, Berkeley http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hearst SIGIR 2000

2. Outline • Search Interfaces Today • HCI Foundations • The Information Seeking Process • Visualizing Text Collections • Incorporating Context and Tasks • Promising Future Directions

3. Introductory Remarks • Much of HCI is art, still not science • In this tutorial, I discuss user studies whenever available • I do not have time to do justice to most of the topics.

4. What do current search interfaces do well?

5. Web search interfaces solutions • Single-word queries • Standard IR assumed long queries • Web searches average 1.5-2.5 words • Problems: • One word can have many meanings • What context is the word used in? • Which of many articles to retrieve?

10. Web search interfaces solutions • Single-word queries • Solutions: • Incorporation of manually-created categories • Provides useful starting points • Disambiguates the term(s) • Development of sideways hierarchy representation • Ranking that emphasizes starting points • Link analysis finds server home pages, etc • Use of behavior of other users • Suggests related pages • Popularity of pages

11. Web search interfaces are interesting in terms of what they do NOT do • Current Web interfaces • Are the results of each site experimenting • Only those ideas that work for most people survive • Only very simple ideas remain • Abandoned strategies • Scores and graphical bars that show degree of match • Associated term graph (altavista) • Suggested terms for expansion (excite) • Why did these die?

12. What is lacking in Web search?

13. What is lacking? • Support for complex information needs • Info on the construction on highway 80 • Research chemo vs. surgery • How does the 6th circuit tend to rule on intellectual property cases? • What is the prior art for this invention?

14. What is lacking? • Integration of search and analysis • Support for a series of searches • Backing up and moving forward • Suggested next steps • Comparisons and contrasts • Personal prior history and interests • More generally: • CONTEXT • INTERACTIVITY

15. What is lacking? • Question Answering • Answers, not documents! • Active area of research and industry • Not always appropriate • Should I have chemo or surgery? • Who will win the election?

18. Question Answering State-of-the-Art • Kupiec SIGIR 93, Srihari & Li NAACL 00, Cardie et al. NAACL 00 • Goal: Find a paragraph, phrase or sentence that (hopefully) answers the question. • Approach: • Identify certain types of noun phrases • People • Dates • Hook these up with question types • Who • When • Match keywords in question to keywords in candidate answer that contain the right kind of NP • Use syntactic or simple frame semantics to help with matching (optional)

19. Question Answering Example Q: What Pulitzer prize-winning author ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York? Relevant sentences from encyclopedia: In 1968 Norman Mailer won the Pulitzer Prize for …. In 1975, Mailer ran for the office of New York City mayor. …

20. Information Intensive Business analysis Scientific research Planning & design Quick lookup Question answering Context-dependent info (location, time) The future of search tools:A Prediction of a Dichotomy

21. Human-Computer Interaction

22. What is HCI? • HCI: Human-Computer Interaction • A discipline concerned with • design • evaluation • implementation of interactive computing systems for human use • The study of major phenomena surrounding the interaction of humans with computers.

23. Shneiderman on HCI • Well-designed interactive computer systems promote: • Positive feelings of success, competence, and mastery. • Allow users to concentrate on their work, rather than on the system.

24. Design What is HCI? Organizational & Social Issues Task Technology Humans

25. User-centered Design • Focus first on what people need to do, not what the system needs to do. • Formulate typical scenarios of use. • Take into account • Cognitive constraints • Organizational/Social constraints • Keep users involved throughout the project

26. Waterfall Design Model (from Software Engineering) Initiation Application Description Analysis Requirements Specification Design System Design Implementation Product ? Slide by James Landay

27. UI Design = Iteration Design Evaluate Prototype

28. Comparing Design Processes • Waterfall model • The customer is not the user • User-centered design • Assess what the user needs • Design for this • Redesign if user needs are not met

29. Steps in Standard UI Design • Needs Assessment / Task Analysis • Low-fidelity Prototype & Evaluation • Redesign • Interactive Prototype • Heuristic Evaluation • Redesign • Revised Interactive Prototype • Pilot User Study • Redesign • Revised Interactive Prototype • Larger User Study

30. Task Analysis • Observe existing work practices • Create examples and scenarios of actual use • Try out new ideas before building software

31. Rapid Prototyping • Build a mock-up of design • Low fidelity techniques • paper sketches • cut, copy, paste • video segments • Interactive prototyping tools • Visual Basic, HyperCard, Director, etc. • UI builders • NeXT, etc. Slide by James Landay

32. Usability EvaluationStandard Techniques • User studies • Have people use the interface to complete some tasks • Requires an implemented interface • "Discount" vs. Scientific Results • Heuristic Evaluation • Usability expert assesses guidelines

33. Cognitive Considerations:Norman’s Action Cycle • Human action has two aspects • execution and evaluation • Execution: doing something • Evaluation: comparison of what happened to what was desired

34. Action Cycle Goals Execution Evaluation The World

35. Action Cycle Goals Evaluation Evaluation of interpretations Interpreting the perception Perceiving the state of the world Execution Intention to act Sequence of actions Execution of seq uence of actions The World

36. Norman’s Action Cycle • Execution has three stages: • Start with a goal • Translate into an intention • Translate into a sequence of actions • Now execute the actions • Evaluation has three stages: • Perceive world • Interpret what was perceived • Compare with respect to original intentions

37. Gulf of Evaluation • The amount of effort a person must exert to interpret • the physical state of the system • how well the expectations and intentions have been met • We want a small gulf!

38. Mental Models • People have mental models of how things work: • how does your car start? • how does an ATM machine work? • how does your computer boot? • Allows people to make predictions about how things will work Based on slide by Saul Greenberg

39. Strategy for Design • Provide a good conceptual model • allows users to predict consequences of actions • communicated through the image of the system • relations between user’s intentions, required actions, and results should be • sensible • consistent • meaningful (non-arbitrary) Based on slide by Saul Greenberg

40. Design Guidelines Shneiderman (8 design rules) • Consistency • Shortcuts (for experts) • Feedback • Closure • Error prevention • Easy reversal of actions • User control • Low memory burden There are hundreds of design guidelines listings!

41. Design Guidelines for Search UIs I think the most important are: • Reduce memory burden / Provide feedback • Previews • History • Context • User control • Query modification • Flexible manipulation of results • Easy reversal of actions

42. Designing for Error Norman on designing for error: • Understand the causes of error and design to minimize these causes • Make it possible to reverse actions • Make it hard to do non-reversible actions • Make it easy to discover the errors that do occur • Change attitude towards errors: A user is attempting to do a task, getting there by imperfectapproximations; actions are approximations to what is actually desired.

43. HCI Intro Summary • UI design involves users • UI design is iterative • An art, not a science • Evaluation is key • Design guidelines • are useful • but application to information-centric systems can be difficult

44. Recommended HCI Books • Alan Dix et al., Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd edition (Feb 1998) Prentice Hall; • Ben Shneiderman, Designing the user interface : strategies for effective human--computer interaction, 3rd ed. Addison-Wesley, 1998. • Jakob Nielsen, Usability Engineering, Morgan Kaufmann, 1994 • Holtzblatt and Beyer, Making Customer-Centered Design Work for Teams, CACM, 36 (10), October 1993. • www.useit.com • world.std.com/~uieweb • usableweb.com

45. Supporting the Information Seeking Process Two parts to the process: • search and retrieval • analysis and synthesis of search results

46. Standard IR Model Assumptions: • Maximizing precision and recall simultaneously • The information need remains static • The value is in the resulting document set

47. Problem with Standard Model: • Users learn during the search process: • Scanning titles of retrieved documents • Reading retrieved documents • Viewing lists of related topics/thesaurus terms • Navigating hyperlinks • Some users don’t like long disorganized lists of documents

48. A sketch of a searcher… “moving through many actions towards a general goal of satisfactory completion of research related to an information need.” (after Bates 89) Q2 Q4 Q3 Q1 Q5 Q0

49. Berry-picking model (Bates 90) • The query is continually shifting • Users may move through a variety of sources • New information may yield new ideas and new directions • The query is not satisfied by a single, final retrieved set, but rather by a series of selections and bits of information found along the way.

50. Implications • Interfaces should make it easy to store intermediate results • Interfaces should make it easy to follow trails with unanticipated results • Makes evaluation more difficult.