Evaluating tag-based information access in image collections

The availability of social tags has greatly enhanced access to information. Tag clouds have emerged as a new "social" way to find and visualize information, providing both one-click access to information and a snapshot of the "aboutness" of a tagged collection. A range of research projects explored and compared different tag artifacts for information access ranging from regular tag clouds to tag hierarchies. At the same time, there is a lack of user studies that compare the effectiveness of different types of tag-based browsing interfaces from the users point of view. This paper contributes to the research on tag-based information access by presenting a controlled user study that compared three types of tag-based interfaces on two recognized types of search tasks - lookup and exploratory search. Our results demonstrate that tag-based browsing interfaces significantly outperform traditional search interfaces in both performance and user satisfaction. At the same time, the differences between the two types of tag-based browsing interfaces explored in our study are not as clear. Copyright 2012 ACM

Does Design Contribute to Ease of Use: An Exploratory Study of Web Facets in The Result Pages of Two Search Engines

An exploratory study was conduced to examine the design aspects of Web facets found in the search result pages of two search engines: Exalead and Excite. The goal of the study was to determine if Web facet design could contribute to perceived ease of use. This study builds upon findings from an earlier study (Milonas, 2010) in which the results indicated that users perceived the Web facets evident in the search result pages of the Exalead search engine easier to use than those found in Excite. The researcher surmised that the design of these Web facets might have contributed to the difference in perceived ease of use. The relationship between design and user perception in determining the ease of use of Web facets within these two search engines is explored. In the first component of the study, an expert inspection of the various design aspects of the search result pages of Exalead and Excite was conducted.  In the second part of the study, five participants conducted an experiment using the Web facets found in the search result pages of the two search engines. Findings of both the expert inspection and the usability evaluation showed that there does not seem to be a significant difference in the design of Web facets within the two search engines. The findings seem to indicate that design of Web facets is not a contributory factor in terms of Web facet ease of use

Toward a Design Space for Categorized Overviews of Search Results

There is a burgeoning movement to create user interfaces that combine searching and browsing in order to facilitate knowledge discovery. Categorized overviews are promising techniques to improve the browsing capabilities and subject access of search results. Research is needed to examine the design space in order to promote the usability and understanding of such interfaces. This paper proposes a set of 14 dimensions grouped into three areas of the design space for categorized overviews. These dimensions emerged from a review of recent literature about exploratory search interface design and categorized overviews, an analysis of five examples that are seeking to meet the needs of knowledge discovery, and personal experience. Finally, this paper discusses the application of the dimensions on a case study of a categorized overview created for a bibliographic database

Are episodic context features helpful for refinding tasks? Lessons learnt from a case study with lifelogs

Both psychological theories and findings in information science suggest that people may remember the episodic context of previously encountered information. This implies that a user’s episodic memory might be utilized to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of refinding tasks. In this paper, we report a case study which aims to explore the feasibility of integrating episodic context into the design of information refinding systems. The subjects in this study collected 20 months of rich contextual data along including the full text of all documents, emails, web pages and so on, which they accessed during the collection period. We developed a “memory-friendly” system based on psychological theories to test the hypothesis through user studies requiring the subjects to find their personal data using this system. From examination of the user activity log and a post-task questionnaire, we found that although our designed features, which support or utilize episodic context or autobiographical memory, were not used as frequently as we expected, they did improve the effectiveness of the refinding tasks

ENHANCING IMAGE FINDABILITY THROUGH A DUAL-PERSPECTIVE NAVIGATION FRAMEWORK

This dissertation focuses on investigating whether users will locate desired images more efficiently and effectively when they are provided with information descriptors from both experts and the general public. This study develops a way to support image finding through a human-computer interface by providing subject headings and social tags about the image collection and preserving the information scent (Pirolli, 2007) during the image search experience. In order to improve search performance most proposed solutions integrating experts’ annotations and social tags focus on how to utilize controlled vocabularies to structure folksonomies which are taxonomies created by multiple users (Peters, 2009). However, these solutions merely map terms from one domain into the other without considering the inherent differences between the two. In addition, many websites reflect the benefits of using both descriptors by applying a multiple interface approach (McGrenere, Baecker, & Booth, 2002), but this type of navigational support only allows users to access one information source at a time. By contrast, this study is to develop an approach to integrate these two features to facilitate finding resources without changing their nature or forcing users to choose one means or the other. Driven by the concept of information scent, the main contribution of this dissertation is to conduct an experiment to explore whether the images can be found more efficiently and effectively when multiple access routes with two information descriptors are provided to users in the dual-perspective navigation framework. This framework has proven to be more effective and efficient than the subject heading-only and tag-only interfaces for exploratory tasks in this study. This finding can assist interface designers who struggle with determining what information is best to help users and facilitate the searching tasks. Although this study explicitly focuses on image search, the result may be applicable to wide variety of other domains. The lack of textual content in image systems makes them particularly hard to locate using traditional search methods. While the role of professionals in describing items in a collection of images, the role of the crowd in assigning social tags augments this professional effort in a cost effective manner

Interactive faceted query suggestion for exploratory search : Whole-session effectiveness and interaction engagement

Abstract The outcome of exploratory information retrieval is not only dependent on the effectiveness of individual responses to a set of queries, but also on relevant information retrieved during the entire exploratory search session. We study the effect of search assistance, operationalized as an interactive faceted query suggestion, for both whole-session effectiveness and engagement through interactive faceted query suggestion. A user experiment is reported, where users performed exploratory search tasks, comparing interactive faceted query suggestion and a control condition with only conventional typed-query interaction. Data comprised of interaction and search logs show that the availability of interactive faceted query suggestion substantially improves whole-session effectiveness by increasing recall without sacrificing precision. The increased engagement with interactive faceted query suggestion is targeted to direct situated navigation around the initial query scope, but is not found to improve individual queries on average. The results imply that research in exploratory search should focus on measuring and designing tools that engage users with directed situated navigation support for improving whole-session performance.Peer reviewe