Building effective search interfaces is hard, particularly when the goal is to support exploratory search rather than precision-oriented fact finding that the major search engines excel at. The challenge is to support a complex, evolving, information-rich task in a generalizable, understandable, and manageable way. We have some good ideas about how to make various components of information exploration interfaces; Marti Hearst’s book, for example, details much of the science and engineering that goes into good design for information seeking interfaces. None the less, the challenge of how to put these techniques into usable, effective and engaging interfaces that make it possible to do serious information seeking, remains.

A team of students at SIMS took a step in this direction with their Masters’ Thesis project called Migratory Words. The system allows people to search and browse a collection of news articles. Results are presented in a combination of visualizations and text lists that highlight terms, documents, and collections. The use terms and phrases that represent the ideas latent in the documents is a particularly welcome addition to traditional document-focused interfaces.

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The Enterprise Search Summit is taking place right now, and I am sorry to be missing it. The program looks quite interesting, including keynotes by Marti Hearst and Peter Morville, among others. Marti’s talk this morning, related to her recent book on information retrieval, was summarized by Daniel Tunkelang on his blog. While she did touch on topics covered in her book, including some of the collaborative search work done here at FXPAL, she has shifted her focus somewhat to address the more social issues around information seeking. While I don’t the details of her presentation, she did mention similar topics when she participated at a recent panel on search at the WWW2010 conference. The twitter streams from both events capture her “socialize vs. personalize” comments. (Since Twitter search sunsets quickly, here are the TwapperKeeper archives for #ess10 and the www2010 Search Is Dead panel.)

Peter Morville should be an interesting speaker on information retrieval-related topics, some of which he covers in his books Search Patterns and Ambient Findability. I wrote about some of his ideas earlier, but am curious to hear how he is presenting his work.

I hope that both talks are recorded and made available on the web.

Update: Daniel Tunkelang’s summary of Peter Morville’s talk

As a follow-up to my review of iAnnotate, I did a quick exploration of drawing apps available for the iPad to understand the limitations of ink handling on the device. I tried five free annotation apps that were identified by the query “draw free for ipad.” These included Draw Free for iPad, PaperDesk LITE for iPad, Adobe Ideas 1.0 for iPad, Draw for iPad, and Doodle Buddy for iPad.

These apps were structured either around the canvas or the notepad metaphor, and supported a range of colors, inks, and effects. My only test was to select the thinnest ink the tool allowed, and to try to write a short phrase on each one. The test was purely visual, but then it’s the visual impact that I am interested in.

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Yesterday I attended an evening presentation session of student projects created in several courses related to HCI at UC Berkeley. The show was organized by Bjoern Hartmann and Maneesh Agrawala, and featured presentations by teams from four courses from three different disciplines: CS, SIMS, and  Art/Anthropology. Each presentation took 2.5 minutes, and there were over 30 presentations total. Most of the work was around the design of mobile applications, and some creative constraints (e.g., don’t design for students; focus on specific populations) stipulated at the beginning of the projects ensured a great diversity of designs.

I cannot possibly do justice to the effort and to the results here, but fortunately all presentations and many associated videos are available online. Some presentations stood out, however, and deserve special mention.

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The capture of whiteboard images, while required for systems such as ReBoard, is not particularly interesting these days from a research perspective. What’s more interesting (and what’s interesting to us about ReBoard) is how this captured information can be used.

We’ve been using video cameras as network-accessible Axis digital still cameras for ReBoard, and they produce reasonable, but by no means great, images. They work pretty well in our offices, where they can be mounted on the opposite wall, and calibrated to image the whiteboard. We run the captured images through a process that corrects the distortion and extracts the whiteboard region, and then shove the images (both the original and the distorted one)  into a database. Works great.

But what happens when the whiteboard moves?

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Recently I tried an experiment with one of our iPads to read and review a journal submission using the iAnnotate application. For the purposes of review, I had to read and comment on the draft, and then write up the review. I approached the problem much like I would had I been reading on paper, which included highlighting important, controversial or confusing passages, writing comments and reactions in the margins, and flipping around the document. These were all activities we had supported in XLibris, and I was curious how the iPad would stack up.

The short of it is: loading documents: OK; readability: Great; inking: poor; highlighting: poor; text annotations: OK; within-document navigation: so-so; between-document navigation: OK. Overall: good for reading, not good for active reading.

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Microsoft appears to have killed the Courier concept before that two-screen device ever became a reality. It’s not clear what factors led to the decision, but on some level it’s a shame. Endgadget called it the “one of the finest unicorns that ever unicorned across our screens.” The two-screen nature of the device, while attractive in principle, may not have been as useful in real life. What was undoubtedly useful was the application suite demonstrated in their vision videos that seamlessly integrated a range of activities.

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Yesterday, the WWW 2010 conference featured a panel with representatives of Yahoo! (Andrei Broder – Fellow and VP, Search & Computational Advertising, Yahoo! Research), Bing (Barney Pell – Partner, Search Strategist for Bing, Microsoft), Google (Andrew Tomkins – Director of Engineering at Google Research), and academia (Marti Hearst – Professor, School of Information, University of California-Berkeley) on the current state of search on the web. The title was meant to be provocative, but I doubt that anyone in the room thought that this was a solved problem. I wasn’t at the conference, but was able to follow it on Twitter and through a video feed kindly provided by Wayne Sutton. A persistent recording of the event is available through qik by Kevin Marks, although the audio is rather faint. (Wayne’s feed had great audio, but the panelists were sitting down, and were blocked by the podium!)

The panel covered a lot of ground, and some of this has already been summarized by Jeff Dalton on his blog. In short, the big search engines are moving beyond the top 10 links and exploring additional capabilities — both in the ranking algorithms and in the style of interaction — to satisfy a broader range of information needs.

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Are maps better than text for presenting information on mobile devices? That was the question explored by Karen Church, Joachim Neumann, Mauro Cherubini and Nuria Oliver in a paper (about to be) presented at the WWW 2010 conference, they present evidence that in some cases a textual display of information supports people’s information needs more effectively than a map-based one.

The two interfaces were evaluated over the course of a month of use “in the wild” (but in Ireland, not in in Spain). Each participant had access to both interfaces, and was shown how to use them to ask location-specific questions, which would be answered by others nearby. Availability of answers was communicated via SMS messages.

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The slides for our CHI 2010 talk on workplace communication tool use are now available online. In the study, we explored people’s use of workplace communication tools, and found that new tools don’t replace previous ones, that multiple similar tools coexist, and that people’s communication patterns shift over time. Please see Thea’s earlier post for additional details on the research.

Overall, the talk was well-received, but I thought one question from the audience might warrant some additional comments. The question focused on our use of the word “workplace” in the paper (and in the title) while still discussing some aspects of communication that seemed not quite work-like.

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