Information Scent. Slides adapted from Caitlin Kelleher

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Warren Sullivan
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1 Information Scent Slides adapted from Caitlin Kelleher 1

2 Available Information Growing Exponentially Image from: 2

3 YouTube Uploads per Minute As of 2012, users upload 72 hours of video every minute 3 Image from:

4 Growth of Human Capabilities Growth in attention Capacity of human working memory Year Adapted from Peter Pirolli 4

5 Attention is a Limited Resource A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate it efficiently. Herbert Simon Image from: 5

6 Humans as Informavores Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy, the mind survives by ingesting information. In a very general sense, all higher organisms are informavores. Image from: 6

7 Inspired by Optimal Foraging Theory An animal will forage as long as the expected gain within a patch is greater than the expected rate of gain from a new patch. Tb = average time to next patch T* = Optimal time to stop foraging a patch Adapted from Peter Pirolli 7

8 Patches Image from: 29th-arbor-day-native-and-fruit.html Adapted from Charles Gibbs 8

9 Information Foraging Theory Information Patches: The temporal and spatial nature in which information is clustered. Information Scents: Determination of information value based on navigation cues and metadata. Information Diet: Decision to pursue one information source over another Source: 9

10 Informavore s Goal information value maximize[ ] cost of interaction Basically: maximize information gain, minimize the work necessary to accomplish that information gain. 10

11 Strategy As long as I predict that I m more likely to find my target information on my current path than by backing up, keep going. 11

12 Web Behavior Graphs (WBGs) ANTZ S1 S6 S7 S10 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S9 S2 S9 S10 S11 S5 S7 S5 S7 S9 S6 S10 S11 S12 S13 S10 S5 S9 S10 S10 S9 S9 S5 S11 S12 S13 S12 S12 S12 S5 S11 S12 S13 S14 S11 S13 S14 S14 S5 S14 S15 S16 S17 S18 S19 S13 S15 S2 S15 S15 S13 S4 S16 S17 S18 S19 S20 S19 S20 S2 S16 S16 S17 S18 S19 S20 X S14 S20 S20 S21 S22 S19 S20 S18 S21 S22 S14 S21 S23 X S5 S11 S23 S11 S24 S11 S25 S26 S27 S28 S29 S30 S31 S32 S27 S26 S33 S34 S35 S36 S35 S37 X CITY S1 S6 S7 S10 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S1 S2 S3 S4 S1 S2 S3 S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 S6 S7 S7 S9 S3 S5 t? S6 S7 S9 S2 S4 S5 S6 S7 S9 S7 S9 S10 S11 S12 S7 S9 S12 S13 S12 S7 S11 S6 S7 S1 S7 S10 S6 S10 S5 S10 S11 S12 S13 S7 X Adapted from Peter Pirolli 12

13 Information Foraging Guidelines Make sure users can accurately predict what information they will find using a link/category. labeling word choice Organization (remember card sorting?) Make sure users know where they are and how it relates to their goals 13

14 Information Foraging Guidelines Signal that information on your site is nutritious and easy to catch Show sample content to help increase information scent cues Support good navigation and search to make it easy to get to the content 14

15 Information Foraging Guidelines Make it easy for users to find related content. When thinking about the expected tasks, are there related ones you can support? With undergrad research, once I ve found out what a typical project looks like, maybe I want to know how to get involved. Is that supported? 15

16 Information Foraging Guidelines Encourage return behavior. Know what your users come looking for and making it easy to find that. 16

17 In Practice To be useful, you need to know: What information goals users have coming to your site. What words they will associate with those goals. Parc also has an algorithm that tries to infer these. Given each goal, where you want them to end up and by what path. Then, you can look at where they deviate, what s more attractive, and fix the proximal information. 17

18 Business vs. Pleasure Users surfing without a specific need (e.g. let s see what s on Google News, Reddit, etc) won t fully follow this. But, even when the goal is something like entertain me designing for good proximal cues is still a good reflex. 18

19 A walkthrough You want to buy a new tablet during the holiday sales. You need for it to allow you to primarily give presentations, take notes, read/write . But you would also like to be able to run some desktop/laptop applications. What are the best choices? 19

20 Ground Rules Start from a search engine. Nominate one person in the group to be the searcher. Others in the group construct an annotated web behavior graph including the pages, what info on the pages leads to the navigation decision (i.e. the information scent), and the searcher s warmer or colder rating. 20

Principles of Visual Design

Principles of Visual Design Lucia Terrenghi Page 1 Talk about rules in design No fixed rules Just guidelines, principles Where do they come from? How can I apply them? Page 2 Outline Origins of the principles