Unit 8 Reading Notes

Unit 8 Reading Notes

MIR Ch10

·          This reading discusses user interfaces for communication between human information seekers and information retrieval systems. The well-designed interface would significantly improve the user experience and the search performance.

·          Principles for design of user interfaces: provide informative feedback, permit easy reversal of actions, support an internal locus of control, reduce working memory load, and provide alternative interfaces for novice and expert users.

·          Information visualization provides visual depictions of very large information spaces. Main techniques: icons, color highlighting, brushing and linking, panning and zooming, focus-plus-context, magic lenses, and animation.

·          The article introduces four kinds of starting points which should be provided by the search interfaces: lists, overviews, examples and automated source selection.

·          There are five primary human-computer interaction styles: command language, form fill in, menu selection, direct manipulation and natural language. Each technique has been used in query specification interfaces and each has advantages and disadvantages.

·          It also explains how to show the relationship of the document set to query terms, collection overviews， descriptive metadata, hyperlink structure, document structure, and to other documents within the set (via context), in order to make the document set more understandable.

·          Relevance feedback is an effective technique used for query reformulation. A standard interface for relevance feedback consists of a list of titles with checkboxes beside the titles that allow the user to mark relevant documents.

Reading: Search User Interfaces

·          The web search interfaces always keep simple and unchanging for the following reasons:

n   Search is a means towards some other end, rather than a goal in itself.

n   Search is a mentally intensive task.

n   The interface design must be understandable and appealing to a wide variety of users of all ages, cultures and backgrounds, applied to an enormous variety of information needs.

·          An important quality of a user interface (UI) is its usability which includes five basic components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, and satisfication.

·          Eight design desiderata for search user interfaces generally:

·            Offer informative feedback.

·            Support user control.

·            Reduce short term memory load.

·            Provide shortcuts for skilled users.

·            Reduce errors; Offer simple error handling.

·            Strive for consistency.

·            Permit easy reversal of actions.

·            Design for closure.