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.
The Noisy Channel 
9 replies on “Marti Hearst’s Keynote at Enterprise Search Summit”
Thanks for the summary, Dan, nicely done. And it was good to see you, albeit briefly. I do want to point out that I made an effort with this talk to give a new twist to and a different emphasis from what I’d written about in the book. So it is an all-new talk. I’ll be posting the slides and maybe a link to the video on the book web site before too long.
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Marti, my pleasure! Thanks for giving the talk–it was a nice twist on the material, and I think you did a great job of make the scholarship accessible to an audience of practitioners. Please let me know when you post the slides / video, and I’ll link or embed them here.
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[…] others. Marti’s talk this morning, related to her recent book on information retrieval, was summarized by Daniel Tunkelang on his blog. While she did touch on topics covered in her book, including some […]
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[…] DISCLOSURE ← Marti Hearst’s Keynote at Enterprise Search Summit […]
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Hi, Daniel. You don’t happen to know if this keynote was recorded by videolectures.net?
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Greg, I don’t know, but Marti said “video” so I assume there will be one!
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It good to see talk of emotions in information seeking coming to practice-oriented conferences. I worked out a model for what I called the Information Search Experience (ISX) several years ago for a presentation at the IA Summit in Austin TX. (Summary in interaction magazine also). Like Marti, this is based on Kuhlthau’s work (a former professor of mine). See: http://www.iasummit.org/2004/finalpapers/KalbachIASummit2004_ISX.pdf.
I also have a little bit about ISX in my book: http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Web-Navigation-Optimizing-Experience/dp/0596528108
Thanks for the summary, Daniel. For those of us who couldn’t be there, it great to keep up with what others are saying.
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Thanks for the comment and links! If you’re interested in some of the ongoing work on emotional response to search, I encourage you to read Henry Feild and James Allan’s HCIR 2009 paper on “Modeling Search Frustration“.
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Hi Daniel,
Thank you so much for the mention of IFB at Marti’s keynote and links! I wanted to mention that I am wrapping up my book on ecommerce search UI right now — it should be out in the Spring of 2011.
Cheers,
Greg
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