Pride of Szeged

A large part of today's seminar was given over to a presentation on "Information Visualization" by Xia Lin on Information Visualization. There was also some initial feedback on the KMT, which I'll summarize again later when more comments come back.

An important point occurred to me during this class, as we discussed relevance feedback, and why users generally don't use it. It's not because it's not effective, but more because they can't be bothered.

I pointed out that it's important for designers to avoid the trap of thinking that this is because users are lazy or stupid. Instead, users are (for the most part) busy and distracted by a dozen different systems with which they have to interact (email, word processing, browsing, etc.). They are actually fairly smart about how to prioritize their time and attention on each system, and they tend to avoid spending more time on one (such as to learn easier/better methods) than absolutely necessary.

The critical bit here is that users don't have time to invest in a given system, so the interface had better draw on their previous experiences to cut the handling time and make more efficient use of the time they do spend learning to use it.
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During the seventh HCI class, I presented the Helpsite and KMT to the group in brief, giving an overview of the goals of Knowledge Management team and the structure of the tools. I asked the group to participate over the following weeks by using the KMT to contribute documents and provide feedback on their experience with the UI.

One of the points I tried to make followed up on our discussions of the essential problem of wikipedia- how to allow for community-based contribution without sacrificing the quality of the content? In the case of the KMT, I argued that overly-strict quality controls in our original design created a bottleneck that was reducing the freshness of the knowledgebase and the usefulness of the tools.
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Week Six of HCI saw a presentation by Cathy Marshall on digital interfaces and archiving, and some general discussion about relational browsing and how to best give users access to enormous numbers of documents (such as on the BLS website, with 17k documents). One attempted solution that we looked at is the RAVE "relational browser" developed at SILS, which uses rollover behavior and scripting to do on-the-spot queries behind the scenes to modify the presentation of the content.
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