At CHI 2007, in a workshop on exploratory search, we had a long discussion of the definition of exploratory search, during which Sue Dumais kept challenging the room to look broadly, bringing in examples and counter-examples not only from full text search, but from more structured datasets that were also fair game.

Exploratory search is just one part of HCIR; her work on adapting systems to users’ vocabulary (not vice-versa) that led to LSI, innovative search interfaces (“If in 10 years we are still using a rectangular box and a list of results, I should be fired.” ), finding and re-finding information on your personal computer, and personalization of search results all fit squarely into the HCIR space.

Those who attended the HCIR’08 workshop organized by Daniel Tunkelang (Endeca), Ryen White (MSR), and Bill Kules (CUA) got a great overview of Sue’s research. This week, during her  opening keynote at SIGIR (see notes from Jeff Dalton and Jonathan Elsas, who, unlike me, were actually there!) Sue described the course of her career as an IR researcher, first at Bellcore and at Microsoft Research. In her career, she has consistently focused on the user both for inspiration for design, and for evaluating the systems.

“If you have an operational system and you don’t use what your users are doing to improve, you should have your head examined” (from  Jeff Dalton)

I expect we’ll be seeing more interesting and innovative results from her group, both at SIGIR and at the HCIR workshop series.

Thanks to Nathan Treloar’s post on search user experience, I came across a set of Flickr pages created by Peter Morville dedicated to documenting user interface designs for search interfaces. His goal is “collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns” to inform subsequent design. The pages collect many images of well-designed sites, grouped into about 20 different categories (e.g., Faceted Navigation, Pagination, Clustering, E-Commerce, etc.) with annotations by Peter highlighting some important aspects of each design.

Continue Reading

Marti Hearst‘s new book, Search User Interfaces, is out, as Daniel Tunkelang reported earlier. The book covers a range of topics related to interaction around information seeking, including topics such as design, evaluation, models of information seeking, query reformulation, etc. It also discusses emerging trends: Mobile Search Interfaces, Multimedia (although this field has arguably been around long enough to no longer be emerging), Social Search, and natural-language queries. The Social Search section discusses collaborative filtering, recommendation systems, and collaborative search, describing several systems along the full range of depth of mediation.

Continue Reading

[“ubuntu”] describes humanity as “being-with-others” and prescribes what “being-with-others” should be all about. Ubuntu emphasises sharing, consensus, and togetherness.

according to ubuntu.com. Over the last two days I have experienced a palpable lack of togetherness with this beast in an attempt to explore the world beyond Windows. I have some Grails/Java code that I wanted to try running on a linux box rather than on Windows (on which I had no problem getting it to work). Grails is a dynamic language that requires run-time compiler support, so it must use the JDK rather than the JRE.

Continue Reading