UCB HCC Retreat Search Text Mining Web Site Usability Marti Hearst SIMS

UCB HCC Retreat TileBars Scatter/Gather DynaCat Cat-a-Cone Search Interfaces: Past Projects

UCB HCC Retreat BAILANDO Projects Better Access to Information using Language Analysis and Novel Dynamic Organizations

UCB HCC Retreat Current BAILANDO Projects CHA-CHA: Web Search results in Context LINDI: UI support for Search Text Data Mining TANGO: Automated Web Site Usability

UCB HCC Retreat Search UIs Combine Browsing & Search Place Search Results in Context Large Category Hierarchies

UCB HCC Retreat Cha-Cha Students : Mike Chen, Jamie Laflen, Jason Hong, Jimmy Lin, Shiang Chen

UCB HCC Retreat Medical Category Hierarchy

UCB HCC Retreat DynaCat (Pratt, Hearst, & Fagan 99)

UCB HCC Retreat DynaCat Study Design Three queries 24 cancer patients Compared three interfaces ranked list, clusters, categories Results Participants strongly preferred categories Participants found more answers using categories Participants took same amount of time with all three interfaces Similar results have been verified by another study by Chen and Dumais (CHI 2000)

Cat-a-Cone Interface (Hearst & Karadi 97)

UCB HCC Retreat Improving Search via Large Category Hierarchies How to show intersections across category types? How to preview related categories in a user- tailored, dynamic manner?

UCB HCC Retreat Information retrieval Text Data Mining

UCB HCC Retreat Information retrieval Selection or rejection of existing documents based on a function of word match.

UCB HCC Retreat Text Data Mining Relationships between information in documents can create new facts, not previously known.

UCB HCC Retreat Imagine You are a medical researcher Your patient has spinal inflammation numbness in fingers low TC levels negative results for all tests How can you help her?

UCB HCC Retreat Idea A new way of searching text. Link pieces of information together to formulate hypotheses …

UCB HCC Retreat LINDI Linking Information for New DIscoveries Students: Barbara Rosario, David Blei Three main parts Search UI for building and reusing hypothesis seeking strategies. Statistical language analysis techniques for interpreting the text. Backend for interfacing with various databases and translating different formats.

UCB HCC Retreat Gathering Evidence Spinal Inflammation Numbness in fingers Low TC Levels

UCB HCC Retreat Gathering Evidence Spinal Inflammation Numbness in fingers Low TC Levels Find diseases associated with each

UCB HCC Retreat Gathering Evidence Spinal Inflammation Numbness in fingers Low TC Levels Find unanticipated commonalities

UCB HCC Retreat Supporting Cascaded Search Operations Spinal Inflammation Numbness in fingers Low TC Levels

UCB HCC Retreat

New Language Analysis First use category labels to retrieve candidate documents Then use language analysis to detect causal relationships between concepts Title: Magnesum deficiency implicated in increased stress levels. Interpretation: related-to Use these to find relationships and formulate hypotheses

UCB HCC Retreat Statistical Semantic Parsing Modern statistical techniques Mainly applied to syntactic structure Probabilistic knowledge representation Represent hypotheses with different degrees of certainty.

UCB HCC Retreat Automating Assessment of Web Site Usability

UCB HCC Retreat Why Worry?  Problem: IBM's extranet  Heavy use of help and search  Unhappy users  Solution  Massive web site redesign  Focus on info-organization, not the purchasing process.  Cost: "in the millions"  Results  Not announced or trumped up  Use of "help" decreased 84%  Sales increased 400%

UCB HCC Retreat Web TANGO Tool for Assessing NaviGation & Organization Student: Melody Ivory Goal: automated support for comparing design alternatives How: Assess usability of the information architecture Approximate people’s information-seeking behavior (Monte Carlo simulation) Output quantitative usability metrics

UCB HCC Retreat Anatomy of Web Site Design Courtesy of Mark Newman Information Architecture Navigation Design Information Design Graphic Design

UCB HCC Retreat Usability Evaluation Standard Techniques  User studies  Have people use the interface to complete some tasks  Requires an implemented interface  "Discount" vs. Scientific Results  Heuristic Evaluation  An expert assesses a design or implementation according to certain guidelines

UCB HCC Retreat Automated Usability Evaluation  Logging/capture  Pro: Easy  Con: Requires implemented system  Con: Don't know the user task (web)  Con: Don't present alternatives  Con: Don't distinguish error from success  Analytical Modeling  Pro: doable at design phase  Con: models an expert  Con: academic exercise  Simulation

UCB HCC Retreat Existing Metrics  Web metric analysis tools report on what is easy to measure, e.g.:  Predicted download time  Depth/breadth of site  We want to worry about  Content  User goals/tasks  Not available from logs  We also want to compare alternative designs.

UCB HCC Retreat Monte Carlo Simulation  Have a model of information structure  Have a set of user goals  Want to assess navigation structure  Compare alternatives/tradeoffs  Identify bottlenecks  Identify critically important pages/links  Check all pairs of start/end points  Check overall reachability before and after a change.

UCB HCC Retreat Monte Carlo Simulation  At each step in the simulation  Assume a probability distribution over a set of next choices.  The next choice is a function of:  The current goal  The understandability of the choice  The overall complexity of the set of choices  Prior interaction history  These can use models of "scent"  Varying the distribution corresponds to varying properties of the links  Spot-check important choices

UCB HCC Retreat One Monte Carlo simulation step for Design 1, Task 1. Simulation starts from the home page and the target information is at Renter Support. X

UCB HCC Retreat Monte Carlo simulation results for Design 1, Task 1. Simulation runs start from all pages in the site. Average Navigation times are shown for Tasks 2 & 3. X

UCB HCC Retreat Using Simulator Results Design Decisions Use Design 1 Improve Tasks 1 & 2 Next Steps Analyze results for Tasks 1 & 2 Create new Design 1 Repeat simulation to compare old & new designs Iterate if necessary

UCB HCC Retreat Research Issues: Navigation Predictions Develop IR model for predicting link selection Requirements Information need (task metadata) Representation of pages (page metadata) Method for selecting links (relevance ranking) Maintaining user’s conceptual model during site traversal (scent [Fur97,LC98,Pir97]) One possible approach Information Foraging Theory [PC95,Pir97,PPR96] Functional categorization of pages based on features Prediction of relevance to current page Consider link connectivity, text similarity & usage

UCB HCC Retreat Other HCC-Related Projects Using a large digital desk in design Ame Elliot Using visualization for light design Dan Glaser User interfaces and computer security Prof. Doug Tygar, Rachna Dahmija