Search

When users have poorly defined or complex goals, search interfaces that offer only keyword-searching facilities provide inadequate support to help them reach their information-seeking objectives. The emergence of interfaces with more advanced capabilities, such as faceted browsing and result clustering, can go some way toward addressing such problems. The evaluation of these interfaces, however, is challenging because they generally offer diverse and versatile search environments that introduce overwhelming amounts of independent variables to user studies; choosing the interface object as the only independent variable in a study would reveal very little about why one design outperforms another. Nonetheless, if we could effectively compare these interfaces, then we would have a way to determine which was best for a given scenario and begin to learn why. In this article, we present a formative inspection framework for the evaluation of advanced search interfaces through the quantification of the strengths and weaknesses of the interfaces in supporting user tactics and varying user conditions. This framework combines established models of users and their needs and behaviors to achieve this. The framework is applied to evaluate three search interfaces and demonstrates the potential value of this approach to interactive information retrieval evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in search technology have meant that search systems can now offer assistance to users beyond simply retrieving a set of documents. For example, search systems are now capable of inferring user interests by observing their interaction, offering suggestions about what terms could be used in a query, or reorganizing search results to make exploration of retrieved material more effective. When providing new search functionality, system designers must decide how the new functionality should be offered to users. One major choice is between (a) offering automatic features that require little human input, but give little human control; or (b) interactive features which allow human control over how the feature is used, but often give little guidance over how the feature should be best used. This article presents a study in which we empirically investigate the issue of control by presenting an experiment in which participants were asked to interact with three experimental systems that vary the degree of control they had in creating queries, indicating which results are relevant in making search decisions. We use our findings to discuss why and how the control users want over search decisions can vary depending on the nature of the decisions and the impact of those decisions on the user's search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]