Lecture 26: Information Architecture

1. Prof. Ray Larson & Prof. Marc Davis UC Berkeley SIMS Tuesday and Thursday 10:30 am - 12:00 pm Fall 2002 http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is202/f02/ Lecture 26: Information Architecture SIMS 202: Information Organization and Retrieval

2. Announcements • Extra Credit due date extended until December 13

3. Lecture Overview • Review • Interfaces for Information Retrieval • Web Search for Intranets (Guest) • Information Architecture • What is information architecture? • Elements of information architecture • Organization systems • Labeling systems • Navigation systems • Search and indexing systems • Metaphor systems • Audience analyses • Case Study Credit for some of the slides in this lecture goes to Warren Sack and Abbe Don

4. Lecture Overview • Review • Interfaces for Information Retrieval • Web Search for Intranets (Guest) • Information Architecture • What is information architecture? • Elements of information architecture • Organization systems • Labeling systems • Navigation systems • Search and indexing systems • Metaphor systems • Audience analyses • Case Study Credit for some of the slides in this lecture goes to Warren Sack and Abbe Don

5. Task = Information Access The standard interaction model for information access • Start with an information need • Select a system and collections to search on • Formulate a query • Send the query to the system • Receive the results • Scan, evaluate, and interpret the results • Stop, or • Reformulate the query and go to Step 4

6. HCI Questions for IR • Where does a user start? • Faced with a large set of collections, how can a user choose one to begin with? • How will a user formulate a query? • How will a user scan, evaluate, and interpret the results? • How can a user reformulate a query?

7. Starting Points for Search • Faced with a prompt or an empty entry form … how to start? • Lists of sources • Overviews • Clusters • Category Hierarchies/Subject Codes • Co-citation links • Examples, Wizards, and Guided Tours • Automatic source selection

8. List of Sources • Have to guess based on the name • Requires prior exposure/experience

9. Old Lexis-Nexis Interface

10. Overviews • Supervised (manual) category overviews • Yahoo! • HiBrowse • MeSHBrowse • Unsupervised (automated) groupings • Clustering • Kohonen feature maps

11. Yahoo! Interface

12. MeshBrowse (Korn & Shneiderman 95)

13. HiBrowse (Pollitt 97)

14. Scatter/Gather Interface

15. Kohonen Feature Maps on Text

16. HCI for IR: Query Specification • Question 2: How will a user specify a query?

17. Query Specification • Interaction styles (Shneiderman 97) • Command language • Form fill • Menu selection • Direct manipulation • Natural language • What about gesture, eye-tracking, or implicit inputs like reading habits?

18. Command-Based Query Specification • COMMAND ATTRIBUTE value CONNECTOR … • FIND PA shneiderman AND TW interface • What are the ATTRIBUTE names? • What are the COMMAND names? • What are allowable values?

19. Form-Based Query Specification

20. Form-Based Query Specification

21. HCI for IR: Viewing Results • Question 3: How will a user scan, evaluate, and interpret the results?

22. Display of Retrieval Results • Goal: • Minimize time/effort for deciding which documents to examine in detail • Idea: • Show the roles of the query terms in the retrieved documents, making use of document structure

23. Putting Results in Context • Interfaces should • Give hints about the roles terms play in the collection • Give hints about what will happen if various terms are combined • Show explicitly why documents are retrieved in response to the query • Summarize compactly the subset of interest

24. TileBars Example

25. VIBE (Olson et al. 93, Korfhage 93)

26. InfoCrystal (Spoerri 94)

27. Problems with InfoCrystal • Can’t see proximity or frequency of terms within documents • Quantities not represented graphically • More than 4 terms hard to handle • No help in selecting terms to begin with

28. Cha-Cha (Chen & Hearst 98) • Shows “Table-Of-Contents”-like view, like SuperBook • Focus+Context using hyperlinks to create the TOC • Integrates Web Site structure navigation with search

29. HCI for IR: Query Reformulation • Question 4: How can a user reformulate a query?

30. Query Reformulation • Thesaurus expansion • Suggest terms similar to query terms • Relevance feedback • Suggest terms (and documents) similar to retrieved documents that have been judged to be relevant • “More like this” interaction

31. Summary: HCI for IR • Focus on the task, not the tool • Be aware of • User abilities and differences • Prior work and innovations • Design guidelines and rules-of-thumb • Iterate, iterate, iterate • It is very difficult to design good UIs • It is very difficult to evaluate search UIs • Better interfaces in future should produce better IR experiences

32. Lecture Overview • Review • Interfaces for Information Retrieval • Web Search for Intranets (Guest) • Information Architecture • What is information architecture? • Elements of information architecture • Organization systems • Labeling systems • Navigation systems • Search and indexing systems • Metaphor systems • Audience analyses • Case Study Credit for some of the slides in this lecture goes to Warren Sack and Abbe Don

33. Approach to User Interface Design Media Design Interaction Design Storytelling (narrative structures) points of view Information Architecture politics of information scenarios From Abbe Don, 202 Lecture 2001

34. Information Architcture • What is information architecture? • Definition • Practitioners • Examples • Brainstorming exercise • Elements

35. What is information architecture? • Information Architect: n. 1) the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear. 2) a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge. 3) the emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding and the science of the organization of information. • Richard Saul Wurman, Information Architects, 1996

36. Who is an information architect? • Avi Rappaport • Abbe Don • Peter Merholz • Jesse James Garrett • Lou Rosenfeldt • Peter Morville • ASIS&T SIGIA members • Many, many others

37. Who is not (necessarily) an information architect? • Marketing team • Graphic designers • Editors • Technical staff • Project management • I.e., the rest of the team that an information architect works with…

38. Examples of Information Architecture • Wurman’s Access Guides • Spiekermann’s subway maps • Macaulay’s books • Carbone Smolan’s museum signage • Newspapers • Phone books • websites

39. Access Guides • Guide books for cities • Information organized by location, colored coded by category • Where am I now? • What’s near by?

40. Brainstorming Exercise • Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 1998. • What do you hate about the Web? • What do you like about the Web?

41. Lecture Overview • Review • Interfaces for Information Retrieval • Web Search for Intranets (Guest) • Information Architecture • What is information architecture? • Elements of information architecture • Organization systems • Labeling systems • Navigation systems • Search and indexing systems • Metaphor systems • Audience analyses • Case Study Credit for some of the slides in this lecture goes to Warren Sack and Abbe Don

42. Elements of information architecture • Organization systems • Labeling systems • Navigation systems • Search and indexing systems • Metaphor systems • Audience analyses

43. Elements of Information Architecture * * * * * * * * * * Organization system * * * * Search System * * Navigation System *= major labels

44. Organization Systems • Ways to Organize Information (according to Wurman) LATCH • Location • Alphabetical • Time • Category • Hierarchy/Continuum (small to large, dark to light)

45. Organization Systems • Ways to Organize Information • Topics • Tasks • Processes • Metaphors • Narratives • Audiences

46. Labeling Systems • This passage quotes “a certain encyclopedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (I) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et certera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” • (Foucault citing Borges, The Order of Things, 1970)

47. Types of Labels • Labels as indexing and search terms • Link labels • Labels as headings • Labels within navigation systems (e.g., pull down menus) • Icons

48. Sources of Labels • Other web sites • Controlled vocabularies/thesauri • From content • From experts and users

49. Navigation Systems • Types • Hierarchical • Global • Local • Other? • Information access methods including social navigation, berrypicking, etc.

50. Elements of Navigation Systems • Graphical and textual navigation bars • Frames • Pop-up menus • Tables of content • Site maps • Guided tours • The sky’s the limit with java, javascript, etc.