Week 9 Readings

Week 9 Readings

MIR Chapter 10
The user interface should be as unobtrusive as possible, and help to bring the user clarity in their information seeking behavior.  There are more complex metrics to rank systems on than recall and precision alone.  A user who has to spend a lot of time with a system may rate it poorly, or some may not be interested in recall at all for their information need.
"An empty screen or a blank entry form does not provide clues to help a user decide how to start the search process" - wow this isn't a negative at all!
I like the venn diagram visualization of the Boolean queries, it seems very useful.  I also like that this reading presents old methods that have been tried in search interfaces.  Before Google changed every search display to be just one way, so many ideas were attempted, and this is an important reference point to make sure we don't waste our time on something already tried and failed.

SUI Chapter 1
The user interface of search has not changed nearly at all since 1997.  Novice users are not naturally inclined to ask keyword questions though, but instead want to ask a natural language question.  Interface design needs to be targeted to a certain user group!  Then the interface should be designed, tested, and redesigned to find a nice balance to meet this user group.  This can be a challenge because some principles of interface design are opposites of each other (keep it the same, and keep it simple), as well as the fact that UI design is not an exact science.

SUI Chapter 11
Concordance visualizations are very interesting!  SeeSoft and TextArc look very different from each other, but are both really nice.