Experiencing Information

Around 1980 Nicholas Belkin proposed a new model for understanding information seeking, called ASK: Anomalous States of Knowledge. (See Part 1 and Part 11 of this landmark article). A key tenant of this model is that information needs are difficult to precisely expressed. Seekers, sometimes even experts in a given information system, are not able to properly formulate queries to access the information they need. Information retrieval systems should help people ask the right questions to get the right answers.

Search Radar has an interesting approach that would reflect the ASK view of information seeking. Instead of returning links to other web pages, Search Radar gives back a list of related terms. These are display in a link cloud and in a list. From this list, you can then search a major search engine. Yes, it’s an intermediate step, but for unknown or vague information, it might be a step that adds clarity to the seeker’s strategy.

Mark Nolan has a nice article in the April/May 2008 issue of the ASIST Bulletin called “Exploring Exploratory Search.”

Citing an article by Gary Marchionini (”Exploratory search: From finding to understanding.), Mark points to three larger classes of behavior: Lookup, Learn, Investigate. Each has subclasses of behavior. These behaviors, however, aren’t linear. Makes sense: we can bounce back and forth between them when searching information.

This recalls Allan Foster’s nonlinear model of information seeking he proposed in 2004 in an ASIST article. “The behavioral patterns are analogous to an artist’s palette, in which activities remain available throughout the course of information-seeking,” says Foster. He identified three large phases as well, which he calls Opening, Orientation, and Consolidation. Not quite the same, but similar.

Mr Nolan gives the Investigate mode of searching the most attention in his article–and rightfully so. It’s the hardest to understand and to design for. How can people find things they don’t know they need? How can a search system support unknown information needs?

Of course, Donna Mauer describes this mode of searching “don’t know what you need to know” in her Boxes and Arrows article “Four Modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them.”

The article ends with some high-level areas to consider in supporting exploratory search. I must admit I was hoping for more than a focus on improved search retrieval systems and better content. What about text analytics and automatic extraction techniques? What about semantic analysis of tagging and the like? Seems we’re still thinking in terms of an active information seeking model for the user when maybe passive models may be more fruitful in exploring information. In other words, people shouldn’t have to find information; the information should find the right people.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, you can add graphs to your Google Docs spreadsheets. Particularly cool is the Gapminder motion graph. I couldn’t get the attributes on the right of the graph to show up from my spreadsheet, but it’s still cool.

Garrick Schmitt from Avenue A | Razorfish is giving a presentation at the IA Summit called “Do People Really Use Tag Clouds.” See the description in Summit program or the slides for the presentation on SlideShare.

Seems like much of the presentation is based on a survey they did of 475 Americans about their use of Web 2.0 features and artifacts, like wikis and such. See their Digital Consumer Behavior Study.

The thing that caught my eye was the statistic on use of tab clouds (which gives the presentation its name, obviously). 65% of those surveyed reported never having used a tag cloud, and 23% using them only once in a while. (12% use them more frequently).

Interestingly, those numbers change when asked, Do you find tag clouds helpful? Here, 39% said never, 29% once in a while, 24% most of the time, and 7% all of the time.

This mirrors a claim I made in Designing Web Navigation (Chapter 3):

“As a navigational mechanism, tag clouds seem to have limited value. If a visitor has a known information need, for instance, a cloud of links isn’t really efficient. They seem to be more of a novelty than an effective navigation mechanism. But the visual weighting of links provides valuable information: it shows at a glance what others are talking about or about the concerns of a community. Tag clouds reflect a certain zeitgeist for a site or topic.”

I was glad to come across some data that supports my claim.

Thanks to Soy Kim, a translator for O’Reilly Asia, Designing Web Navigation is now available in Korean. Here it is as seen on Yes24.com. They’ve promised to send me a copy. Will be interesting to see it in an Asian language.

If you haven’t seen Peter Morville’s collection of search interfaces on flickr, check them out.

In Designing Web Navigation, I have a whole chapter on integrating search and browse. The point is that from a user’s perspective navigating and searching aren’t different things. People just want to find information. And we know from berrypicking theory that people can switch their seeking strategies rapidly while looking for information online.

Google introduced Sitelinks in their search results back in 2006. These are automatically generated based on an analysis of the target site’s structure. Often, the links naturally reflect the main navigation options of the site. With this, the scenario is: you do a search on Google, and from the results can directly navigate the target site. (BTW, the introduction of Sitelinks is another good reason to make sure your site is well structured and has a meaningful navigation system.)

Recently, Google also introduced a site search features embedded right in the results list:

So now the scenario is: do a keyword search on Google, browse the results list which includes navigation from target sites, and now you can even do a keyword search on specific site. The line between search and browse is really blurred here. And that’s a good thing, I believe.

Viewdle offers a cool, new technology: face recognition search. From the site:

“Viewdle automatically looks inside the video, frame-by-frame, to create a real-time index of true on-screen appearances with unrivaled accuracy and relevance.”

Looks like it’s pretty accurate, too. Reuters labs is apparently trying this out.  See for yourself…

Chris Voss and Leonieke Zomerdijk of the London Business School released a long-ish paper back in June 2007 about the role of customer experience in designing innovative services. See the full report online: Innovation in Experiential Services: An Empirical View (pdf).

They looked case-based field studies from nearly 100 companies (mostly in the UK and US) since 2003. From the executive summary:

“The research found that experiential services are often designed from the perspective of the customer journey rather than as a single product or transaction; the service is seen as a journey that spans a longer period of time and consists of multiple components and multiple touchpoints. The journey perspective implies that a customer experience is built over an extended period of time, starting before and ending after the actual sales experience or transaction. During a customer journey, numerous touchpoints occur between the customer and the organisation or the brand. These touchpoints need to be carefully designed and managed. The research shows that innovation takes place at each of these touchpoints as well as of the overall journey itself.”

Of course, the journey view of customer service puts the customer at the center of attention and not the technology (as with many traditional innovation perspectives). And the journey perspective is broader in scope since it essentially can look at any touchpoint between the customer and service.

How do you get the right journey perspective? Like many of the successful innovators in the study, you should go out an observe people:

“With regard to the process of innovation in experiential services, the research revealed that many innovations were driven by detailed insights into customers. Both design and consultancy firms and experiential service providers invested a large amount of time and effort in conducting research leading to insights in customers’ behaviour, needs and preferences. Common techniques were traditional market research, empathic research to understand customers at an emotional level, trend watching and learning from companies in different industries. This indicates that experiential innovations are typically customer rather than technology driven.”

Check out the full study. It’s not short, but written fairly straightforward in accessible language.

Paul Sherman has a good article in UX Matters called Where’s My Stuff? Beyond the Nested Folder Metaphor. It includes a video of the Bumptop Interface, which was developed by Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan. See the video of the interface on YouTube or more information on the Bumptop website, including a video from TED 2007. I came across this about a year and half ago, but forgot the name of the interface. So I was thankful to have come across it again on UX Matters.

The YouTube video of the Bumptop interface begins with an interesting thesis:

“In real work spaces, documents are piled and casually arranged in a way that subtly conveys information to the owner. This expressiveness is lost in today’s GUI desktop.”

In my ethnographic studies, this is something I’ve directly observed to be true in the law domain. Legal information workers implicitly use piles and location to manage workflow. Piles of client files around the office are essentially physical to-do lists. At a glance, they convey who has what amount of work to do and when. Other physical attributes of paper documents support this type of workflow management, such as color and size and additional flags sticking out of the sides of books and folders.

Converting this intuitive, organic way of working to an online system is difficult. You lose an overview quickly. Even with two computer monitors, it’s hard to get the same kind of spatial horizontal-ness you can easily achieve with paper documents. Online workflow management also requires a great amount of discipline: you must rigorously update information in order for the system to function. This, in my opinion, is the biggest hurdle. The benefits of online document management and workflow management are in the long run perhaps higher, but the change needed to get there is quite large because it requires a fundamental change in behavior.

In light of the iPhone and MS Surface and other similar interfaces, the Bumptop interface has potential, in my opinion. It’s a break-away from the tyranny of the typical GUI model. Not sure if Bumptop will solve the loss of expressiveness current desktop GUIs cause, but it pointing to thinking in the right direction…or at least in a different direction.

Johnny Chung Lee is a real creative person. Check out his hack of a Wii remote to get a “Minority Report” style of interaction. No real practical application shown, but it’s quite fascinating nonetheless.

I previously blogged about Gapminder and Hans Roslings talk at TED demonstrating this tool. I learned that you can see more eye-opening visualizations on a regular basis with GapCasts, a video blog from Hans and Co. These short videos really show the potential power of information visualizations in enhancing understanding.

One thing I noticed though, is that without a speaker explaining the visualizations, they wouldn’t make too much sense. Or least it would take a while to figure out what they really mean. So, the real challenge of info viz is in the interpretation of the graphs and charts, not in creating the visualizations. But how can a visualization be so self-explanatory that anyone can immediately understand what it’s really saying?

Just got wind of a relatively new open web legal called PreCYdent. Their mission is clear:

“PreCYdent is based on two fundamental principles. First, we at PreCYdent believe that all lawyers, law librarians, law students, and the general public should have access to state-of-the-art search technology to help them navigate through the large and complex body of legal authority. We have heard law students ask, as perhaps you have, about online legal research: “Why can’t I just do my search with a few search words, like I do on Google?” PreCYdent has an answer to that question: Now you can. Second, we believe judicial opinions and statutes must be in the public domain, in practice as well as in theory. To us this means that effective legal research in all of these materials should be free to the user — not expensive, not inexpensive. Free. We believe this principle is of vital importance not only to the United States, but to all nations that practice or aspire to practice the rule of law.”

Yes, it’s a Google-like search experience but clunky and a little rough around the edges in terms of interaction and visual design. Still, up front prior to conducting a search there are few options–you really just enter keywords and go. Then, on the results side of things there are plenty of key filters.

It’s still in its alpha mode right now, so could turn out to be rather promising. Since it allows users to upload legal documents, it could turn into a very comprehensive collection much in the same way Wikipedia is for some of us THE place to turn for encyclopedic information.

Just came across Managed Q, a search application the inventors describe as “dedicated to helping you manage your entire Search Experience: from the keyword, to results, to previewing, to refinement and repeating with a new query.”

The entity extraction around person, place, and thing seems fairly good. But I’m particularly interested in how you interact with the entities. Just by rolling over any one of them, you can see the precise locations in the found documents where that term appears. Niffty.

Of course, to do this they also only show images of the pages found. That’s right–no text list. Even the paging navigation show thumbnails of the next or previous pages. There are a few interaction problems here and there, but overall it’s quite an interesting experience. I like the thumbnail browse view–it’s helpful for somes types of queries and information seeking.

Kevin Kelly has a very interesting post in his book in progress The Technium. Victor tipped me off to this (thanks Victor). Check out Better Than Free.

The internet allows for easily made and distributed copies: copies of documents, music, photos, whatever. Kelly asks some good questions:

“If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?”
[...]

why would we ever pay for anything that we could get for free? When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing? “

He then identified eight values that can’t be easily copied or cloned, which he calls generatives:

• Immediacy - How quickly do you get the copy of the thing you need?
• Personalization - To what degree is the copy customized to your tastes and needs?
• Interpretation - What services help you better understand or enjoy the copy?
• Authenticity - Is the copy what it says it is?
• Accessibility - How do I access the copy?
• Embodiment - How is the copy represented and presented?
• Patronage - Can I support the creator of the copy even if I can get it for free?
• Findability - How hard or easy is it for me to find the copy?

The recalls a recent talk I saw online of Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, speaking about the Abundance Ecomony. (Sorry - can’t find the video right now). If everything is moving towards being free or virtually free, how do businesses monetize their services? Advertising..yes, OK. But it looks like Kevin Kelly has given us a more robust framework to consider yet different ways.

I know Kelly mentions Authenticity, but I’d like to see more about credibility and authority too. Given the recent boom of credibility with the work of BJ Fogg, for one, that seems important enough to be a high-level generative. I guess Experience would come under Embodiment, but I’d have liked to have seem that more prominent or explicit.