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.

Marcia Bates has a new, interesting article in Information Research called “What is browsing— really? A model drawing from behavioural science research.” This is an invited paper, and, as the title suggests, it’s a review of empirical research reported in previous studies. Professor Bates is able to draw conclusions based on others’ research and arrive at a model for browsing.

The opening paragraph itself is quite compelling:

“Though often seen as a casual, incidental behaviour in the general society, browsing, in the information world, is widely recognized as an important information seeking technique. In an academic context, scholars have argued that frequent browsing is often the only way to locate information and resources that cannot be readily described by index terms. Further, some kinds of information are recognized as relevant only upon discovery. In short, there are the things you know you do not know and the things you do not know you do not know. Browsing provides an alternative strategy for locating information of the first kind and may provide one of the crucial ways for information of the second kind to be encountered.”

She goes one to review different definitions and models of browsing and concludes that:

“…browsing can be seen to contain four elements, iterated indefinitely, until the overall episode ends:

1. glimpsing a field of vision;
2. selecting or sampling a physical or representational object from the field;
3. examining the object; and
4. physically or conceptually acquiring the examined object, or abandoning it.”

Note that the author herself recognizes that this is visually based, and it omits browsing such things as sound files or the type of browsing a blind person might do while listening to a screen reader. So we have to understand “glimpses” as both visual and auditory–and perhaps even as tactile when considering a Braille reader.

Interestingly enough, Bates pins browsing back to a primal urge all animals have to explore their environment. This recalls Peter Pirolli’s and Stuart Card’s Information Foraging Theory work. Bates writes:

“The in-built motivation for this exploratory behaviour can be called curiosity. Because humans are so strongly reliant on vision, bodily motion often mirrors visual search, in that the second stage of browsing often involves physical movement toward items of interest, which movement, of course, also supports closer visual inspection.”

The last paragraph of the article is disappointing, however:

“The design of interactive information systems needs to incorporate an awareness of human browsing characteristics. Specifically, browsing for information in such systems should not be limited to the opportunity to scan, but instead enable the searcher to manifest the instinctive tendency to engage in a browsing sequence: to glimpse, then to examine or not something glimpsed, then to keep or not the things examined.”

Such vague recommendations for someone who isn’t really in the business of desiging systems always makes me cringe. What does this really mean to any of us who actually design interactive information systems? Not much, I’m afraid.

This article is timely for me, though. I’m scheduled to give a talk at the IA Konferenz in Stuttgart in November on the integration of search and browse. I’ll of course be citing berrypicking material from Bates, but there may be more stuff in this article I can use too. My talk is based directly on Chapter 11 from Designing Web Navigation, where I write:

“From a user’s perspective, navigating and searching aren’t necessarily contrasting activities. People just want to find the information they need. The two aren’t mutually exclusive and really different sides of the same coin. Integrating navigation and search, then, better supports how people really look for information.”

I’d like to post some thoughts about presentations I saw at the Euro IA 2007 Conference. Already mentioned Are’s presentation.

Here’s a summary of mine, which is essentially the last slide in my presentation (available on SlideShare) that sums everything up:

• The cost of adding more information is noise. Don’t forget this when people talk about “unlimited shelf space” online.
• There are different types of sources of metadata to consider: user-generated metadata (e.g., tagging), technically generated metadata (e.g., entity extraction), and owner-created metadata (e.g., controlled vocabularies).
• There are also different types of structures of organization to give meaning and context to the metadata when you represent it: user-created structures (e.g., filtering tags for special interest groups), technically created structure (e.g., Google News page), and owner-created structures (e.g., a thesaurus).
• In the Long Tail, any and all types of metadata and types of structure are needed. Forget about the silly arguments that one will replace the other. Think of it as matrix with the types of metadata on the side and the types of structures on the top.
• Further, since niche markets fit the description of a bounded domain, and since traditional taxonomies and classification are often good strategies for organizing information in bounded domains, as Clay Shirky points out, AND as we move to a culture of niche markets, as Chris Anderson predicts, traditional IA and taxonomy will become more important.
• Additionally, niche markets are defined by the categories you create. Online, a “pile of information”–as David Weinberger says in Everything is Miscellaneous--begins and ends with the IA and organization you develop.
• IA in the Long Tail will be about second order design. You may not be able to customize each page or local navigation scheme. Instead, you need to provide people with the tools they need to make sense of information.
• This means a shift for IA to look at abstract, broader patterns of human information behavior and of information structures in a domain. Card sorting is great, but we need to go well beyond this. We need to look at users much more closely, as well as the inherent patterns of information in a domain.

Not the most practical talk I’ve given, but many people thanked for the talk and said it got them thinking. So it seemed to have been well-received.

There’s a interesting study in the February issue of JASIST about which elements are most important for determining credibility of news stories on automated news aggregator pages, like Google News. [1] Though the findings might be obvious (there’s nothing wrong with stating the obvious), the researchers point to three elements that are most important on such automatically created pages:

• The name of primary source from which the headline and lead were borrowed
• The time elapsed since the story broke
• The number of related articles written on the topic of the story

The researchers write: “…The findings from this study demonstrate that information scent is not simply restricted to the actual text of the news lead or headline in a news aggregating service. Automatically generated cues revealing the pedigree of the hyperlinked information carry their own information scent. Furthermore, these cues appear to be psychologically significant and therefore worthy of design attention. Systems that emphasize such cues in their interfaces are likely to aid information foraging, especially under situations where the user is unlikely to be highly task-motivated and therefore prone toward heuristically based judgments of information relevance. Navigational tools that highlight these cues are likely to be more effective in directing user traffic, as evidenced by early research on newspaper design (which highlighted the attention-getting potential of placement, layout, and color) and screen design (focusing primarily on typography and color…Finally, visualization efforts should focus on attracting user attention towards-and making explicit the value of-proximal cues instead of simply concentrating on visualizing the underlying information.”

This means to me that–even though the pages are automatically generated–there is still information architecture and information design that is critical to understanding and experience the information. Maybe machines won’t replace designers and there is a place for professions like IA in the future after all. Hmm…

[1] Sundar, S. Shyam, Silvia Knoblock-Westerwick, Matthias R. Hastall. News Cues: Information Scent and Cognitive Heuristics. JASIST 58(3): 366-378, 2007.

Silobreaker is a current awareness service that launched at the beginning of 2006. It’s designed for the “light information professional,” as Silobreaker puts it. (I’m assuming this description doesn’t refer to the weight of the person, but how much information work they do). The product is rich with various features for visualizing, extracting, and clustering search results to expose relationships in content and give as much context as possible.

They’ve recently re-done the interface. Check out the the beta launch of Silobreaker.

Not surprisingly, the interface is very link rich: you can click on just about anything at any time. There are also quite a few mouse-over features that reveal a quick view of information in layers and such. I like this overall approach and feel it’s appropriate for the target group. But frankly, I prefer the original version of Silobreaker. The information design of the beta product doesn’t seem to help visually scanning information on the screen, and it appears more cluttered somehow (although the amount of information is about the same).

Overall, Silobreaker lives up to its claim that it provides numerous ways to slice and dice content. For a relatively new servcie, it has many strengths and an impressive range of features and functionalities. The underlying concept moves away from searching in favour of browsing; however, the product is complex and presents potential interaction problems such as small texts and targets to click. Nonetheless, Silobreaker’s unique approach is likely to appeal to many users who conduct news research and require current awareness content on a regular basis.

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and hope to work up into a presentation or story:

- With the advent of digital information available online, people pointed to how much more information there is than before. At first it was about the volume of information.

- But then others pointed out that it’s not the volume, it’s the access to information that changed. The information was previously available, we just couldn’t get to it.

- But really, you could get it if you had enough time. So my thought is that it’s not the amount of information or increased access to it, but the time it takes to find, use, understand, and experience information that has really changed.

This is an important aspect of Information Foraging Theory described by Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card: “We have argued that in an information-rich world, the real design problem to be solved is not so much how to collect more information, but rather, how to optimize the user’s time.” Foraging for information in the digital world is a trade-off between the perceived value of information and the time it takes to interact with and experience it.

Relevance, then, is also time dependent. Relevance guru Tefko Saracevic hints at this with the notion of Situational Relevance in a paper titled Relevance Reconsidered.

Perhaps the Time of Information needs more attention. Or is this so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be mentioned?

After 9 months of writing and 3 months of production, Designing Web Navigation–my first book–is at the printer. There were a few very rough spots with the production, but I think we have most of the kinks worked out.

You can already pre-order it on Amazon.

About The Book:
Since web navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development in some way, the book necessarily paints a broad picture touching on many areas, including things like user research and visual design. But as much as possible the focus throughout remains clearly on creating an effective navigation system. I always try to bring it back home to web navigation whenever the conversation touches other areas.

Thank You:
It’s quite amazing to me how many people contributed to the completion of this book. Here’s a shout out to you all:
- -The primary technical reviewers: Dr. Mark Edwards and Aaron Gustafson.
- -Contributors of the sidebars: Ariane Kempken, my first real mentor in user-centered design, Misha Vaughan, Eric Reiss, Donna Maurer, Victor Lombardi, Andrea Resmini, Emanuele Quintarelli, Luca Rosati, and Mark Edwards.
- -Others who read chapters for me in advance and helped out in other ways: Peter Boersma, Liz Danzico, Jochen Fassbender, Margaret Hanley, Michael Hatscher, Andrea Hill, Theba Islam, Jeff Lash, Victor Lombardi, Ariane Kempken, Michael Kopcsak, Eric Mahleb, Kathryn McDonnell, Donna Maurer, Wolf Nöding Andrew Otwell, Tanya Raybourn, Eric Reiss, Andrea Resmini, Steffen Schilb, Gene Smith, and Joseph Veehoff.