Haystack Blog

Robert Villa of U. Glasgow presented. They consider how broad complex tasks can be supported through a search interface, covering the multiple subtasks someone might need to perform—e.g., investigating several candidate resources in the middle of the search, or, doing multiple related searches. They developed an interface that let users create and manage multiple “aspects” for working on the complex search task. The interface offered a “parallel view” of several aspects as well as a tabbed view showing one aspect at a time. Each aspect had a name, a search box, and a list of search results. They had three simulated tasks—decision making (one solution with multiple paths), explicit aspects (multiple solutions with independent aspects like biographies of several individuals) and implicit aspects (multiple solutions where the aspectsare implicit and interrelated). They compared to a baseline (standard search interface) and yhey recorded how many documents users viewed and marked as relevant, how many searches they did, and user-reported perception of task difficulty. Users were found to view significantly more documents when tackling the implicit/interrelated task. Users carried out noticeably more searches with the aspectual interface. QUery vocabulary was quite different to. People were allowed to finish early; for the baseline interface people stopped much sooner while with the aspectual interface they used the whole time. For the implicit task they found the aspectual interface led to the task being perceived as significantly easier. Users seemed to prefer the tabbed view to the columnar view. Their conclsion is that for really hard tasks, aspectual interfaces seem to help. They failed to proide any measure of the quality of the results.

All in all, a relatively inconclusive outcome. But this is an area that needs more attention—support for a complex process involving many related searches, management of the result sets, etc. Merry Morris has done some nice work here, with a focus on the collaborative aspects.

Followup: more coverage from Fxpal.