gary marchionini
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104
User interfaces for information retrieval on the WWW
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Abstract
Information seeking has become increasingly interactive as tools and services on the WWW have evolved. Thus, there is more to searching than typing in a query and waiting for the search engine to display a set of possible webpages. In this paper, I argue that the only way to achieve substantial advances in search and browse capabilities is to combine research and development in human-computer interaction with research and development in information retrieval to create highly interactive systems that engage the user in defining their needs iteratively and going beyond retrieval to understanding the corpus and the retrieved information. This humancomputer information retrieval (HCIR) perspective is the basis for various designs and will be illustrated with examples from the Open Video Project, a digital video library for the education and research communities (www.open-video.org), and the Govstat Project, an effort to design interfaces, information architectures, and online help for non-specialists looking for statistical information from government websites (www.ils.unc.edu/govstat). Our experience demonstrates how good interface design and usability testing leads to improved information services. Traditionally, information retrieval has been approached as a problem of matching queries to documents. Documents are represented as sets of words and collections as large term-document matrices or inverted indexes. Queries are then similarly represented and a similarity function applied. This approach to information retrieval has been advanced in the WWW mainly by adding new kinds of representations such as the links between webpages and similarity metrics based on these links. However, the user interfaces have remained basically the same-either people type a query made up of a few words or they make selections from hierarchical menu structures. Marchionini (1995) calls the former 'analytical' search and the latter query style one form of 'browsing.' Increasingly, system designers are looking for new ways to improve user interfaces for WWW search services to get beyond the query and ranked list of results displays typical in search engines. This new paradigm in HCIR design is based on bringing the human information seeker more actively into the retrieval process. In this new HCIR paradigm information retrieval becomes human-centered, engaging an active human with information needs, information skills, powerful IR resources, and situated in global and local connected communities, all of which evolve over time. I term this close coupling of people and information 'syminforosis' to mean that people are continuously and inextricably engaged with meaningful information as part of their day-to-day lives. WWW trends toward this perspective are perceptible in search engines such as Clusty, which presents results as clusters of results rather than a single list. The idea is to get people closer to the information they need by giving them more control over the results partitions. This implies that people must take increasing responsibility and control for their activities. The key challenges this trend poses are in linking the conceptual interface to the system backend (e.g., alternative representations and control mechanisms, metadata generation); raising user literacy
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