Surviving the Information Explosion

Christine Alvarado and Jaime Teevan

Overview

Motivation Background Our study Preliminary results Future work

Let Us Interview You!

Email:–What’s the last email you read? What did you do with it?–Have you gone back to an email you’ve read before?

Files:

Web:

–What’s the last file you looked at? How did you get to it?–Have you searched for a file?

–What’s the last Web page you visited? How did you get there?–Have you searched for anything on the Web?

The Information Explosion

You must extract information from: 1.6 billion web pages [Google] Dozens of incoming emails daily Hundreds of files on your personal computer

Limited Organizational Tools

Limited Organizational Tools

Many separate tools Limited organizational support Organizational burden on user Information overwhelms tools

Haystack:Personal Information Storage

Email Web pages

Files Calendar

Contacts

Haystack

Haystack:Personal Information Storage

What was that paper I read last week about

Information Retrieval?Haystack

Haystack:Personal Information Storage

Ah yes! Thank you.

Haystack

User Interface

Pine

Microsoft Outlook

User Study: Goals

Search– Frequency– Type

Organization– Patterns– Use

RATIONALE

Pre-Study [Summer 2001]Setup

6 subjects Observed/recorded working for 1-2 hours Follow-up interview

Pre-studyAreas to Explore

Window placement Desktop organization Context switches Navigation Searches

Previous Work

Paper documents– [Malone, 1983], [Whittaker & Hirshberg, 2001]

Files– [Barreau & Nardi, 1995]

Web (bookmarks)– [Abrams, 1998]

Email/Calendar– [Whittaker & Snider, 1996], [Bellotti & Smith, 2000]

Whittaker and Hirshberg, 2001

Method– Web survey, 50 AT&T employees– Follow-up interview, 14 employees

Goal– Determine attitudes toward paper information organization

Results– Obsolescence– Uniqueness– Filers vs. Pilers

Method

Subjects– 15 MIT CS graduate students (5 women, 10 men)

Setup– 10 short interviews (~ 5 min.)– 1 long interview (~ 45 min.)

Topics– Web, Email, Files

Short Interviews

2 question types– What was the last email/file/web page you looked

at?– Did you search for any email/file/web page?

Goal: Discover patterns in searching and browsing

Long Interviews

“Guided tour” of subject’s bookmarks, email, and file system

Goals:– Discover organizational patterns– Relate organization to

search/browse behavior– Discover problems in

organizational structure

Remember Your Answers?

Getting to a Web page

3 out of 13 Web searches are for information that the user has seen before 64% of searched for email is found in the user’s Inbox

– Using a bookmark: 57% of accesses

– Typing a URL: 20% of accesses

– 19% of above followed links from there

Results based on 85 short interviews

Results

Quantitative– Numbers, counts– Reproducible

Qualitative– Anecdotes– Building hypotheses– Categorization of behaviors

Search: Preliminary Results

Different types of searches– Directory lookup– Confirming information exists– Finding a specific piece of information (QA)– Learning about a topic (Browse)

Cross type searches Interactions with people Searching heavily relied on, very successful

Search: Future Work

Causes of failure Previously viewed information

– Additional cues used for retrieval

Function of browsing during search

Organization: Future Work

Consistency of organization across types Context used in organization Organization’s effect on search

Haystack: Applying What We Learn

Verify our conclusions Boundaries between information types Automation versus support Interaction between search and browsing

Questions?

To learn more about Haystack:

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu

Contact us with comments:

- calvarad@ai.mit.edu

- teevan@ai.mit.edu