Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

July 6, 2012

Puzzling outcomes in A/B testing

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Users — Patrick Durusau @ 9:28 am

Puzzling outcomes in A/B testing by Greg Linden.

Greg writes:

“Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: Five Puzzling Outcomes Explained” (PDF), has a lot of great insights into A/B testing and real issues you hit with A/B testing.

I like where Greg quotes the paper as saying:

When Bing had a bug in an experiment, which resulted in very poor results being shown to users, two key organizational metrics improved significantly: distinct queries per user went up over 10%, and revenue per user went up over 30%! …. Degrading algorithmic results shown on a search engine result page gives users an obviously worse search experience but causes users to click more on ads, whose relative relevance increases, which increases short-term revenue … [This shows] it’s critical to understand that long-term goals do not always align with short-term metrics.

I am not real sure what an “obviously worse search experience” would look like. Maybe I don’t want to know. 😉

Anyway, kudos to Greg for finding an amusing and useful paper on testing.

February 20, 2012

Attention-enhancing information retrieval

Filed under: Information Retrieval,Interface Research/Design,Users — Patrick Durusau @ 8:36 pm

Attention-enhancing information retrieval

William Webber writes:

Last week I was at SWIRL, the occasional talkshop on the future of information retrieval. To me the most important of the presentations was Dianne Kelly’s “Rage against the Machine Learning”, in which she observed the way information retrieval currently works has changed the way people think. In particular, she proposed that the combination of short query with snippet response has reworked peoples’ plastic brains to focus on working memory, and forgo the processing of information required for it to lay its tracks down in our long term memory. In short, it makes us transactionally adept, but stops us from learning.

This is as important as Bret Victor’s presentation.

I particularly liked the line:

Various fanciful scenarios were given, but the ultimate end-point of such a research direction is that you walk into the shopping mall, and then your mobile phone leads you round telling you what to buy.

Reminds me of a line I remember imperfectly as judging from advertising, we are all “…insecure, sex-starved neurotics with 15-second attention spans.”

I always thought that was being generous on the attention span but opinions differ on that point. 😉

How do you envision your users? Serious question but not one you have to answer here. Ask yourself.

December 7, 2011

Distributed User Interfaces: Collaboration and Usability

Filed under: Conferences,Interface Research/Design,Users — Patrick Durusau @ 8:10 pm

2nd Workshop on Distributed User Interfaces: Collaboration and Usability (CHI 2012 Workshop)

Important Dates:

  • Submission Deadline: January 13th, 2012
  • Author Notification: February 10th, 2012
  • Camera-Ready Deadline: April 1st, 2012
  • Workshop Date: May 5th or 6th, 2012 (to be confirmed)

From the website:

Distributed User Interfaces (DUIs) have recently become a new field of research and development in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). The DUIs have brought about drastic changes affecting the way interactive systems are conceived. DUIs have gone beyond the fact that user interfaces are controlled by a single end user on the same computing platform in the same environment.

Traditional interaction is focused on the use of mobile devices such as, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and so on, tearing apart other environmental interaction resources such as large screens and multi-tactile displays, or tables. Under a collaborative scenario, users sharing common goals may take advantage of DUIs to carry out their tasks because they provide a shared environment where they are allowed to manipulate information in the same space at the same time. Under this hypothesis, collaborative DUIs scenarios open new challenges to usability evaluation techniques and methods.

Thus, the goal of this workshop is to promote the discussion about the emerging topic of DUIs, answering a set of key questions: how collaboration can be improved by using DUI? , in which situations a DUI is suitable to ease the collaboration among users?, how usability standards can be employed to evaluate the usability of systems based on DUIs?

Topics of Interest:

  • Conceptual models for DUIs
  • DUIs on ubiquitous environments
  • Distributed User Interface design
  • Public display interaction and DUIs
  • DUIs and coupled displays
  • DUIs and ambient intelligence
  • Human factors in DUIs design
  • Collaboration and DUIs
  • Usability evaluation in DUIs
  • DUIs on learning environment

If you aren’t already dealing with distributed topic map interfaces and collaboration issues, you will be.

November 4, 2011

A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search and Discovery

Filed under: Information Retrieval,Interface Research/Design,Search Behavior,Search Interface,Searching,Users — Patrick Durusau @ 6:08 pm

A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search and Discovery by Tony Russell-Rose.

Abstract:

Classic IR (information retrieval) is predicated on the notion of users searching for information in order to satisfy a particular “information need”. However, it is now accepted that much of what we recognize as search behaviour is often not informational per se. Broder (2002) has shown that the need underlying a given web search could in fact be navigational (e.g. to find a particular site) or transactional (e.g. through online shopping, social media, etc.). Similarly, Rose & Levinson (2004) have identified the consumption of online resources as a further common category of search behaviour.

In this paper, we extend this work to the enterprise context, examining the needs and behaviours of individuals across a range of search and discovery scenarios within various types of enterprise. We present an initial taxonomy of “discovery modes”, and discuss some initial implications for the design of more effective search and discovery platforms and tools.

If you are flogging software/interfaces for search/discovery in an enterprise context, you really need to read this paper. In part because of their initial findings but in part to establish the legitimacy of evaluating how users search before designing an interface for them to search with. They may not be able to articulate all their search behaviors which means you will have to do some observation to establish what may be the elements that make a difference in a successful interface and one that is less so. (No one wants to be the next Virtual Case Management project at the FBI.)

Read the various types of searching as rough guides to what you may find true for your users. When in doubt, trust your observations of and feedback from your users. Otherwise you will have an interface that fits an abstract description in a paper but not your users. I leave it for you to judge which one results in repeat business.

Don’t take that as a criticism of the paper, I think it is one of the best I have read lately. My concern is that the evaluation of user needs/behaviour be an ongoing process and not prematurely fixed or obscured by categories or typologies of how users “ought” to act.

The paper is also available in PDF format.

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