Marcus Nitsche

Knowledge journey: a web search interface for young users

This paper describes a new user interface for a web search engine whose main target group are young users. We explain the main challenges for this user interface and discuss design decisions we made. Our interface is audio supported, contains possibilities for both searching through text input and navigating using menu categories, has a guidance figure for emotional support and a result storage functionality to support cognitive recall. It is also colourful which is appreciated by most children. A comparative study with 28 young users was conducted where we compared our user interface with a classic text search user interface provided by most current web search engines. We evaluated what features of both interfaces children like or dislike to further improve the interface.

Data exploration for bisociative knowledge discovery: a brief overview of tools and evaluation methods

In this chapter we explain the definition of the term (data) exploration. We refine this definition in the context of browsing, navigating and searching. We provide a definition of bisociative exploration and derive requirements on user interfaces, which are designed to support bisociative knowledge discovery. We discuss how to support subtasks of bisociative data exploration with appropriate user interface elements. We also present a set of exploratory tools, which are currently available or in development. Finally, we discuss the problem of usability evaluation in the context of exploratory search. Two main issues - complexity and comparability - are explained and possible solutions proposed.

Supporting Arabic cross-lingual retrieval using contextual information

One of the main problems that impact the performance of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) systems is how to disambiguate translations and - since this usually can not be done completely automatic - how to smoothly integrate a user in this disambiguation process. In order to ensure that a user has a certain confidence in selecting a translation she/he possibly can not even read or understand, we have to make sure that the system has provided sufficient information about translation alternatives and their meaning. In this paper, we present a CLIR tool that automatically translates the user query and provides possibilities to interactively select relevant terms using contextual information. This information is obtained from a parallel corpus to describe the translation in the users query language. Furthermore, a user study was conducted to identify weaknesses in both disambiguation algorithm and interface design. The outcome of this user study leads to a much clearer view of how and what CLIR should offer to users.

Trailblazing information: an exploratory search user interface

When conceptualizing user interfaces (UIs) to support exploratory search, designers need to take into account various aspects. In contrast to ordinary information retrieval UIs, exploratory search user interfaces (XSIs) need to support users in a more complex and often long-term use scenario. Therefore aspects of Personal Information Management need to be taken into consideration. An XSI needs to provide a visually appealing overview over retrieved search results, it should offer simple ways to interact with the result set and offer easy ways of interaction to enhance the users search experience by direct or indirect query refinement options. In this paper we propose a possible solution to address these requirements, implemented a fully functional prototype and present the results of a conducted usability study.

My First Search User Interface

This paper describes an adaptable search user interface whose main focus group are young users. In order to address continuous and --- compared to middle-age users --- relatively fast changes in cognitive, fine motor skills and other abilities of young users, we developed a first prototype of an evolving search user interface ESUI. This ESUI is able to handle changes in design requirements. It is adaptable towards individual user characteristics allowing a flexible modification of the SUI in terms of UI element properties like font size, but also UI element types and their properties. In this work, the goal of SUI adaptation is emotional support for children because positive attitudes towards the system keep them motivated.

Security-relevant challenges of selected systems for multi-user interaction

One important goal in the field of multi-user interaction is to support collaborative work of several users as ergonomic as possible. Unfortunately, security-relevant aspects were neglected in the past. Therefore, we study in this contribution the risks and challenges for security of such collaborative working environments on the basis of five selected pen and gesture-based input techniques. We show that the underlying technologies (Anoto pens, Wii Remotes, DiamondTouch, FTIR Table tops, Microsoft Surface) do have deficits, in particular regarding the insurance of user authenticity and data integrity, and that collaborative working brings new challenges for formal security models. We discuss some of the major challenges on situation and context recognition for dynamic role assignment based on a scenario from the field of energy engineering and point out that several of the underlying problems are of special importance for the development of reliable collaborative multimedia applications for object organization and exchange.

Social Adaptation of ERP Software: Tagging UI Elements

In this paper we present a newly designed annotation and collaboration component, which has been prototypically implemented on top of an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. Standard ERP software is often described as being inflexible in respect to personal needs of a single user or a user group. To cope with this problem, theories, and principles from classical CSCW research and design were combined with recent developments in Social Software and what is now often summarized as Web 2.0 . Our component is inspired by Web 2.0 principles like user generated content, information sharing, and harnessing network effects. As the central paradigm we applied social tagging based on folksonomies as e.g. used in del.ico.us, Flickr, and YouTube. In addition best practices from research on online community building were used to design a social annotating component for ERP systems.

QUEST: querying complex information by direct manipulation

When users search for information in domains they are not familiar with, they usually struggle to formulate an adequate (textual) query. Often users end up with repeating re-formulations and query refinements without necessarily achieving their actual goals. In this paper we propose a user interface that is capable to offer users flexible and ergonomic interaction elements to formulate even complex queries in a simple and direct way. We call this concept QUEST (Query User Interface for Exploratory Search Tasks). The proposed radial user interface supports phrasing and interactive visual refinement of vague queries to search and explore large document sets. The main idea of this concept is to provide an integrated view of queries and related results, where both - queries and results - can be interactively manipulated and influence each other. Changes will be immediately visualized. The concept was implemented on a tablet computer and the usability was stepwise evaluated during a formative and a summative evaluation process. The results reveal high usability ratings, even if the concept was completely unknown to our test users.

Exploring Technical Documents: A Prototype Study

Finding information in unknown, large data sets is not an easy task, especially if they consist of documents in an unfamiliar domain. A collection of several hundred technical reports has been analyzed in order to organize it for efficient and fluent searching, browsing, navigation and even exploration. We describe a user study on an interactive system – the EFB-Explorer – that visualizes the data set by different attributes to reflect the specific relevance of a retrieved document to a user’s query and offers easy-to-use zooming interaction as well as semantic zooming.