Optimal Support for Information Seeking Strategies by Adapting the User Interface

Abstract

To satisfy their information needs, information searchers employ a host of search actions, that fall into different classes. Whereas most current IR systems only support one or very few of these actions well, we aim at the design of user interfaces that support the full range of search actions. The hypothesis of the research outlined in this paper is that different search actions need different user interfaces to support them optimally. And further, that supporting all kinds of search actions optimally in one integrated system increases the performance of the searcher. For testing our ideas, we have built a new document collection of book metadata gathered from Amazon and The Library Thing. The next steps will be the verification of the hypothesis with a prototype using the HyperGrid user interface framework that allows for many kinds of adaption to support a wide range of ISS classes. Later, multiple different interface paradigms will be examined.