Modern Information Retrieval Chapter 10: User Interfaces and Visualization

Contents

  
5. Retaining Search History

interface design!search history history, interfaces for retention of

Section discusses information seeking strategies and behaviors that have been observed by researchers in the field. This discussion suggests that the user interface should show what the available choices are at any given point, as well as what moves have been made in the past, short-term tactics as well as longer-term strategies, and allow the user to annotate the choices made and information found along the way. Users should be able to bundle search sessions as well as save individual portions of a given search session, and flexibly access and modify each. There is also increasing interest in incorporating personal preference and usage information both into formulation of queries and use of the results of search [#!freeman95!#].

For the most part these strategies are not supported well in current user interfaces; however some mechanisms have been introduced that begin to address these needs. In particular, mechanisms to retain prior history of the search are useful for these tasks. Some kind of history mechanism has been made available in most search systems in the past. Usually these consist of a list of the commands executed earlier. More recently, graphical history has been introduced, that allows tracking of commands and results as well. Kim and Hirtle [#!kim95!#] present a summary of graphical history presentation mechanisms. Recently, a graphical interface that displays Web page access history in a hierarchical structure was found to require fewer page accesses and require less time when returning to pages already visited [#!hightower98!#].

An innovation of particular interest for information access interfaces is exemplified by the saving of state in miniature form in a `slide sorter' view as exercised by the VISAGE  system for information visualization [#!roth97!#] (see Figure ). The VISAGE application has the added advantage of being visual in nature and so individual states are easier to recognize. Although intended to be used as a presentation creation facility, this interface should also be useful for retaining search action history.

  

Figure: The VISAGE interaction history visualization [#!roth97!#].