Month: May 2010

Eric Andersen called my attention to a post by Nick Carr entitled “Experiments in delinkification“, in which Carr argues that links embedded in text are distracting, and that we’re better off treating them like the footnotes they evolved from and putting them in a block at the end of the text. It’s an interesting piece, and I see the merits of his argument. Indeed, I remember trying to read a heavily annotated edition of Nabokov’s Lolita, and it was extremely hard to maintain the flow of reading the novel while turning every few seconds to read about every last entomology reference in the text.

Nonetheless, I feel that links supply context, and I’m a fan of keeping context nearby. Indeed, I find that clicking on a link incurs a much lower cognitive cost than flipping to the back of the book, searching for an endnote. I’ve had readers specifically thank me for including links to Wikipedia entries for technical terms. I assume those readers are fully capable of finding those Wikipedia entries themselves, but that they appreciate the convenience of the links.

Some of the commenters on Carr’s post suggest that we use technology to address this tension between preserving the reader’s focus and supplying nearby context. Specifically, we can use CSS and have a JavaScript button that toggles the link style between visible and invisible. I like the idea of handing readers control of the presentation style, though I still think it’s important to pick a sensible default. At the very least, a document should be self-contained so that a reader can choose if and when to look at the material it cites. The document should also give credit where it’s due, linking to the material it cites in a way that is visible to people and search engines. Beyond that, I think it’s really a matter of author style.

Still, I’m curious what folks here–especially long-time readers–think. Do I link so heavily that it’s distracting? Would it be easier to read my posts if the links were in a block at the end? I write for you, so please let me know how I can make this blog better. I don’t have the resources to conduct cognitive load experiments, but I’m very receptive to comments.

The other day, I received a surprise package in the mail: a copy of IBM researchers David Carmel and Elad Yom-Tov‘s newly published lecture on “Estimating the Query Difficulty for Information Retrieval“. I wasn’t even aware that this book was being written, so I’m especially appreciative of the publisher’s kindness to send me a copy.

If you liked Claudia Hauff‘s recent dissertation on “Predicting the Effectiveness of Queries and Retrieval Systems” (cf. my blog post on how “Not All Queries Are Created Equal“), then you’ll love this compact lecture that review the work on pre-retrieval and post-retrieval prediction of query performance. It covers query clarity, ranking robustness, query coherence, and much more.

I’m a big fan of the Morgan & Claypool series of Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, though I’m admittedly biased. Still, I think these books are an excellent way to get an overview of a subject, and Carmel and Yom-Tov’s book delivers wonderfully. For those not lucky enough to receive free copies in the mail, I recommend Amazon, which is selling it for less than $24.

Here are the slides from Marti Hearst’s and Peter Morville‘s keynote presentations at the Enterprise Search Summit:

This morning’s Enterprise Search Summit keynote was by Peter Morville, who has written a number of best-selling books about information architecture. I’ve known Peter for a while and had the pleasure of serving as a reviewer for his latest book, Search Patterns, but had never seen him present this material live. As you can see from his slides, Peter’s presentation style is incredibly visual–almost all of his slides are screenshots or illustrations explaining his concepts. It makes for a great presentation, but a difficult text summary!

The focus of his talk, naturally, was patterns. Specifically, he advocated that we take the behavior patterns of information seekers that library and information scientists have been studying for years, and use them to inform design patterns for search user interfaces.

One point he raised that deserves a deeper dive: number of media (mobile, kiosk, TV) environments push people to browse, partly because of limitations of the medium but also taking advantage of the novelty and relative lack of user habits. Unfortunately, browsing doesn’t always scale in those environments, so search is usually available as a contingency.

Interestingly, while Peter promotes rich interfaces in many of his patterns, he noted that great results ranking plus speedy response (he uses Google “classic” as his example) does allow users to rapidly reformulate their queries while staying in the flow of the information seeking experience. He returned to Google later in his talk, noting that the new interface goes beyond ranking to support a richer user interaction.

And, like me and Marti Hearst (yesterday’s keynote), Peter advocates faceted navigation (I won’t quibble on whether to call it navigation or search) as his favorite search design pattern. He uses the NCSU library as an example not only of a great implementation but also of an organization that continues to experiment with incremental design changes. He also showed faceted search examples from other domains, including Amazon and Buzzilions.

Other patterns he discusses included question answering (his example being Wolfram Alpha) and decision making (his example being Hunch). He didn’t go deep on these, but rather invited the audience to consider a broad palette of strategies for supporting information seeking. Indeed, when I asked him about question answering, he conceded that he was a skeptic and preferred a conversational (i.e., HCIR) approach akin to a librarian’s reference interview.

His closing note was about bridging the gap between physical and digital information, where he offered a potpourri of examples (from Redbox to a tweeting plant). I work in local search, so in my case he’s preaching to the converted. But I think he’s right that everything is only recently coming together–specifically, the ubiquity of digital data on the internet and of mobile devices in the physical world that can both consume and produce that data. Many of us take these developments for granted, but it’s important that we adapt our approach to search to address what is a very recent phenomenon.

Fun stuff! I didn’t get to attend the rest of the summit, but I encourage you to check out the tweet stream at #ESS10.

The Enterprise Search Summit is taking place in New York this week, and I was lucky to be able to attend Marti Hearst’s opening keynote this morning about designing search for humans. If you’ve read her book or heard her present its material, then you’re probably familiar with the pitch she made. Still, it’s great to hear her present it live to a very non-academic audience.

Her major take-aways:

• The user’s emotional response is a key aspect of the information seeking experience.
• There is a double vocabulary problem: different ways to express same concept (cf. Furnas et al.), and users stubbornly anchor on initial query terms (cf. Kahneman, Tversky, et al.)
• Recognition is easier than recall, so interfaces need to support the recognition process.
• Don’t personalize search, socialize it!

She peppered her talk with concrete examples and scholarly references. Given that her book is available online for free, I won’t try to replicate them all here! Still, I’ll single out two Noisy Community members: FXPAL researchers Jeremy Pickens and Gene Golovchinsky (for their SIGIR 2008 work on collaborative exploratory search) and user experience designer Greg Nudelman for his proposal of faceted breadcrumbs as a search user interface.

If you missed her live, you check find a video of a tech talk she gave at Google a few months ago. You can also check out the conference tweet-stream at #ESS10.