Work in Progress: What is "Enough"?

This poster presents dissertation work in progress on the question of ???enough.??? The research focus is the assessment of ???enough??? information to make a decision, in particular a medical decision determining the diagnosis of a patient. ???Enough??? is considered ???enough??? information to facilitate making a decision or taking an action. Qualities of qualities of ???enough??? are identified and described by analyzing case reports published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Findings are reported, and contribute to the development of a conceptual model of factors contributing to ???enough.??

Spatial Consistency and Contextual Cues for Incidental Learning in Browser Design

This paper introduces the Backward Highlighting technique for mitigating an identified flaw in directional column-faceted browsers like iTunes. Further, the technique significantly enhances the information that can be learned from the columns and encourages further interaction with facet items that were previously restricted from use. After giving a detailed overview of faceted browsing approaches, the Backward Highlighting technique is described along with possible implementations. Two of these possible implementations are compared to a control condition to statistically prove the value of Backward Highlighting. The analysis produces design recommendations for implementing the Backward Highlighting technique within faceted browsers that choose the directional column approach. The paper concludes with future work on how to further improve on the statistically proven advantages provided by the Backward Highlighting technique

Children’s information retrieval: beyond examining search strategies and interfaces

The study of children’s information retrieval is still for the greater part untouched territory. Meanwhile, children can become lost in the digital information world, because they are confronted with search interfaces, both designed by and for adults. Most current research on children’s information retrieval focuses on examining children’s search performance on existing search interfaces to determine what kind of interfaces are suitable for children’s search behaviour. However, to discover the true nature of children’s search behaviour, we state that research has to go beyond examining search strategies used with existing search interfaces by examining children’s cognitive processes during information-seeking. A paradigm of children’s information retrieval should provide an overview of all the components beyond search interfaces and search strategies that are part of children’s information retrieval process. Better understanding of the nature of children’s search behaviour can help adults design interfaces and information retrieval systems that both support children’s natural search strategies and help them find their way in the digital information world

Ordinary Search Engine Users Carrying Out Complex Search Tasks

Web search engines have become the dominant tools for finding information on the Internet. Due to their popularity, users apply them to a wide range of search needs, from simple look-ups to rather complex information tasks. This paper presents the results of a study to investigate the characteristics of these complex information needs in the context of Web search engines. The aim of the study is to find out more about (1) what makes complex search tasks distinct from simple tasks and if it is possible to find simple measures for describing their complexity, (2) if search success for a task can be predicted by means of unique measures, and (3) if successful searchers show a different behavior than unsuccessful ones. The study includes 60 people who carried out a set of 12 search tasks with current commercial search engines. Their behavior was logged with the Search-Logger tool. The results confirm that complex tasks show significantly different characteristics than simple tasks. Yet it seems to be difficult to distinguish successful from unsuccessful search behaviors. Good searchers can be differentiated from bad searchers by means of measurable parameters. The implications of these findings for search engine vendors are discussed.Comment: 60 page

Formal and informal learning transfer in the workplace

Both employees and organizations invest significant amounts of time, energy, and funds while promoting knowledge development as a fulcrum for increasing reflexive transformation, gaining higher cognitive skills, and achieving both organizational and workforce members’ performance goals. Our paper advocates multi-faceted and interactionist adult learning approaches designed to stimulate learners’ motivational dispositions as they transition to and from formal and informal learning environments

Supporting effective health and biomedical information retrieval and navigation: A novel facet view interface evaluation

AbstractThere is a need to provide a more effective user interface to facilitate non-domain experts’ health information seeking in authoritative online databases such as MEDLINE. We developed a new topic cluster based information navigation system called SimMed. Instead of offering a list of documents, SimMed presents users with a list of ranked clusters. Topically similar documents are grouped together to provide users with a better overview of the search results and to support exploration of similar literature within a cluster. We conducted an empirical user study to compare SimMed to a traditional document list based search interface. A total of 42 study participants were recruited to use both interfaces for health information exploration search tasks. The results showed that SimMed is more effective in terms of users’ perceived topic knowledge changes and their engagement in user-system interactions. We also developed a new metric to assess users’ efforts to find relevant citations. On average, users need significantly fewer clicks to find relevant information in SimMed than in the baseline system. Comments from study participants indicated that SimMed is more helpful in finding similar citations, providing related medical terms, and presenting better organized search results, particularly when the initial search is unsatisfactory. Findings from the study shed light on future health and biomedical information retrieval system and interface designs