Experiencing Information

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.