Week 9 - User Interaction and Visualization - Reading Note

This week I read:
1. Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Berthier Riberiro-Neto, “Modern Information Retrieval”, Addison Wesley, 1999. ISBN-10: 020139829X. chapter 10 (available at http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/irbook/)
2. Marti A. Hearst. Ch. 1: The Design Of Search User Interfaces. Search User Interfaces. (available at http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/sui_ch1_design.html)
3. Marti A. Hearst. Ch. 11: Information Visualization For Text Analysis. Search User Interfaces. (available at http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/sui_ch11_text_analysis_visualization.html)

According to Hearst, the simple user interfaces of search engines have not changed much since 1997 because search is a means to an end, but mentally challenging and so needs to be free of distraction, and it must make sense to all users. Web search engines must be simpler than historical search systems because the user base is so much broader. She goes on to enumerate many design aspects to consider when designing an interface. Hearst also covers Information Visualization from the perspective of text analysis (text mining).

Baeza-Yates & Riberiro-Neto, present an overview of the information retrieval interaction process and how the user interface must support all of those steps in the process. Many graphical examples are presented. It is surprising how the search interface has not drastically changed over the last 15 years.