EYE-AS-AN-INPUT FOR IMPROVING INTERACTIVE INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

In this work, Publication Access Through Tiered Interaction and Exploration (PATTIE) is presented with the eye as an additional input modality. PATTIE is built upon the scatter/gather information retrieval paradigm where users can explore a visual and interactive table-of-contents metaphor for large-scale document collections in an iterative manner. Additionally, the prototype has been integrated with eye-tracking through the web camera and experimental findings are provided to demonstrate a proof-of-concept for interest modeling at the term level and implicit relevance feedback on the gold standard inaugural 2019 Text REtrieval Conference Precision Medicine dataset (TREC PM). Low error rates for gaze tracking, and acceptable performance on binary classification of interest are reported as well as statistically significant increases in precision and recall performance for relevant information on a TREC PM task when PATTIE is used with eye-as-an-input versus a baseline PATTIE system.Doctor of Philosoph

Improving the effectiveness of public health infographics through design principle application

Infographics have been recognised as an effective and accessible method of information communication, leading to their common use in the dissemination of public health information. However, current design outputs in this field are not frequently produced by information design specialists, resulting in variable design quality. This project looked to address this problem, by investigating the development process for a tool that would allow such users with limited design training to maximise the effectiveness of their infographic outputs. First, a literature review was conducted to define research-based design principles that were applicable to infographics. The value of these principles was then investigated, experimentally comparing user performance with 3 infographic design variations. These design variations applied the design principles to variable degrees; establishing that a high proportion of principles should be applied to maximise user performance. Next, the principles were reduced from 84 to 20, aiming to retain the most salient and maximising accessibility for the non-designer audience. These final principles were developed into motion graphic education resource, aiming to optimise adherence and teach this demographic to successfully apply the principles in their own design. The resource was later tested by conducting a generative design investigation that required 9 healthcare professionals to design a public health infographic, both before and after accessing the resource. Comparative experimental testing on these design outputs revealed that use of the motion graphics resulted in significantly more effective designs, measured by information location efficiency, memorability, and user opinion. This established a successful process for developing effective design education tools, and identified motion graphics as an efficient teaching technique. As well as establishing the needs of the healthcare professional target audience through an iterative user-centred design process. Finally, concluding that use of this resource can be used to maximise the effectiveness of public health infographics, providing potential advantages to the prevention of future disease and protection of the public health

Using eye tracking for evaluating web search interfaces

Using eye tracking in the evaluation of web search interfaces can provide rich information on users' information search behaviour, particularly in the matter of user interaction with different informative components on a search results screen. One of the main issues affecting the use of eye tracking in research is the quality of captured eye movements (calibration), therefore, in this paper, we propose a method that allows us to determine the quality of calibration, since the existing eye tracking system (Tobii Studio) does not provide any criteria for this aspect. Another issue addressed in this paper is the adaptation of gaze direction. We use a black screen displaying for 3 seconds between screens to avoid the effect of the previous screen on user gaze direction on the coming screen. A further issue when employing eye tracking in the evaluation of web search interfaces is the selection of the appropriate filter for the raw gaze-points data. In our studies, we filtered this data by removing noise, identifying gaze points that occur in Area of Interests (AOIs), optimising gaze data and identifying viewed AOIs