1. Surviving the Information Explosion Christine Alvarado and Jaime Teevan

2. Overview Motivation Background Our study Preliminary results Future work

3. Let Us Interview You! Email: – What’s the last email you read? What did you do with it? – Have you gone back to an email you’ve read before? Files: Web: – What’s the last file you looked at? How did you get to it? – Have you searched for a file? – What’s the last Web page you visited? How did you get there? – Have you searched for anything on the Web?

4. The Information Explosion You must extract information from: 1.6 billion web pages [Google] Dozens of incoming emails daily Hundreds of files on your personal computer

5. Limited Organizational Tools

6. Many separate tools Limited organizational support Organizational burden on user Information overwhelms tools

7. Haystack: Personal Information Storage Email Web pages Files Calendar Contacts Haystack

8. Haystack: Personal Information Storage What was that paper I read last week about Information Retrieval? Haystack

9. Haystack: Personal Information Storage Ah yes! Thank you. Haystack

10. User Interface Pine Microsoft Outlook

11. User Study: Goals Search – Frequency – Type Organization – Patterns – Use RATIONALE

12. Pre-Study [Summer 2001] Setup 6 subjects Observed/recorded working for 1-2 hours Follow-up interview

13. Pre-study Areas to Explore Window placement Desktop organization Context switches Navigation Searches

14. Previous Work Paper documents – [Malone, 1983], [Whittaker & Hirshberg, 2001] Files – [Barreau & Nardi, 1995] Web (bookmarks) – [Abrams, 1998] Email/Calendar – [Whittaker & Snider, 1996], [Bellotti & Smith, 2000]

15. Whittaker and Hirshberg, 2001 Method – Web survey, 50 AT&T employees – Follow-up interview, 14 employees Goal – Determine attitudes toward paper information organization Results – Obsolescence – Uniqueness – Filers vs. Pilers

16. Method Subjects – 15 MIT CS graduate students (5 women, 10 men) Setup – 10 short interviews (~ 5 min.) – 1 long interview (~ 45 min.) Topics – Web, Email, Files

17. Short Interviews 2 question types – What was the last email/file/web page you looked at? – Did you search for any email/file/web page? Goal: Discover patterns in searching and browsing

18. Long Interviews “Guided tour” of subject’s bookmarks, email, and file system Goals: – Discover organizational patterns – Relate organization to search/browse behavior – Discover problems in organizational structure

19. Remember Your Answers? Getting to a Web page 3 out of 13 Web searches are for information that the user has seen before 64% of searched for email is found in the user’s Inbox – Using a bookmark: 57% of accesses – Typing a URL: 20% of accesses – 19% of above followed links from there Results based on 85 short interviews

20. Results Quantitative – Numbers, counts – Reproducible Qualitative – Anecdotes – Building hypotheses – Categorization of behaviors

21. Search: Preliminary Results Different types of searches – Directory lookup – Confirming information exists – Finding a specific piece of information (QA) – Learning about a topic (Browse) Cross type searches Interactions with people Searching heavily relied on, very successful

22. Search: Future Work Causes of failure Previously viewed information – Additional cues used for retrieval Function of browsing during search

23. Organization: Future Work Consistency of organization across types Context used in organization Organization’s effect on search

24. Haystack: Applying What We Learn Verify our conclusions Boundaries between information types Automation versus support Interaction between search and browsing

25. Questions? To learn more about Haystack: http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu Contact us with comments: - calvarad@ai.mit.educalvarad@ai.mit.edu - teevan@ai.mit.eduteevan@ai.mit.edu