Learning Visual Features from Snapshots for Web Search

When applying learning to rank algorithms to Web search, a large number of features are usually designed to capture the relevance signals. Most of these features are computed based on the extracted textual elements, link analysis, and user logs. However, Web pages are not solely linked texts, but have structured layout organizing a large variety of elements in different styles. Such layout itself can convey useful visual information, indicating the relevance of a Web page. For example, the query-independent layout (i.e., raw page layout) can help identify the page quality, while the query-dependent layout (i.e., page rendered with matched query words) can further tell rich structural information (e.g., size, position and proximity) of the matching signals. However, such visual information of layout has been seldom utilized in Web search in the past. In this work, we propose to learn rich visual features automatically from the layout of Web pages (i.e., Web page snapshots) for relevance ranking. Both query-independent and query-dependent snapshots are considered as the new inputs. We then propose a novel visual perception model inspired by human's visual search behaviors on page viewing to extract the visual features. This model can be learned end-to-end together with traditional human-crafted features. We also show that such visual features can be efficiently acquired in the online setting with an extended inverted indexing scheme. Experiments on benchmark collections demonstrate that learning visual features from Web page snapshots can significantly improve the performance of relevance ranking in ad-hoc Web retrieval tasks.Comment: CIKM 201

Bridging diversity: a deliberative approach to organizing and application of usability guidelines

Designing interaction for the global society entails addressing multiple issues and challenges, ranging from the technical and economic to the legal and ethical. Usability guidelines recommend or prescribe courses of action and thus play a significant role in designing universally usable systems. Approaches to organizing and applying usability guidelines need to support processes of deliberation and tradeoff, especially when designing for bridging diversity in shared interaction contexts. This paper describes a deliberative approach to addressing some of these design challenges in a rational way. It argues for organizing guidelines by using concepts from Habermas’s discourse theory and Toulmin’s model of argumentation. Application of the approach is illustrated through a set of research-based Web design and usability guidelines. This paper contributes to the HCI literature by providing a theory-based approach to managing and deliberating on many usability guidelines and related usability issues

Conceptual guidelines for educators in the development of their first educational websites

The Internet is a revolutionary technology that is bound to change every aspect of society and the educational system in particular. Following the rapid spread of the Internet, the new developments in the World Wide Web (WWW) technology have created a high level of interest and enthusiasm among many educators

Web Portal Development Issues: Usability, Site Managementand Content Management

This paper is written with the aim to present the concept of integration between usability, content management and site management in order to design an effective tourism website. The study is based on the common problems that surrounds most of the web developers such as useless contents plus poor design that did not reflect the audience needs and poor site management such as broken links and unsorted web pages that are hard to be keep track. The study will cover on the application of the usability techniques to describe what is right and what is wrong with websites seen by millions. It will also covers on how the site management and content management play important roles in achieving high usability of the website. Assessing usability through case studies and following some guidelines on achieving effective site management and good content management will be part of the methods use in this project. The findings from this study highlight the importance of these existing guidelines and the need to modify or implement some of them to suit the requirement of a good tourism website through a prototype developed in this project

Web Usability Testing Guidelines - Incorporate Usability Testing Application

The prototype of web usability testing application is an application that will be used by the developer and evaluator to check and verify the usability of the corporate web pages or sites. The application will consist of usability test that will incorporate three main elements of web site; web design, web navigation and web functions. The first project objective is to help the web developer to ensure the usability of their web site by using the developed prototype. The next objective is to gather technical data or recommendations from the user to be incorporated in the prototype application. The technical data will represent the elements that most of users need in the web site. The scope of this project is about identifying the usability components under the three major elements of web site which is web design, web navigation and web function. The compilation of the components will be the guideline incorporated in the prototype application. The prototype will be developed and used to test the usability of the web site. For the success of the project, the basic System Development Life Cycle methodology that is Waterfall Model will be used whereby it has five phases; planning, analysis, design, implementation and support. The product of the project will lead to build a prototype of web usability testing application that can be used throughout the web development process and to check the usability of the web from time to time

VAS (Visual Analysis System): An information visualization engine to interpret World Wide Web structure

People increasingly encounter problems of interpreting and filtering mass quantities of information. The enormous growth of information systems on the World Wide Web has demonstrated that we need systems to filter, interpret, organize and present information in ways that allow users to use these large quantities of information. People need to be able to extract knowledge from this sometimes meaningful but sometimes useless mass of data in order to make informed decisions. Web users need to have some kind of information about the sort of page they might visit, such as, is it a rarely referenced or often-referenced page? This master\u27s thesis presents a method to address these problems using data mining and information visualization techniques