Search User Interfaces (SUIs) represent the gateway between people who have a task to complete, and the repositories of information and data stored around the world. Not surprisingly, therefore, there are many communities who have a vested interest in the way SUIs are designed. There are people who study how humans search for information, and people who study how humans use computers. There are people who study good user interface design, and people who design aesthetically pleasing user interfaces. There are also people who curate and manage valuable information resources, and people who design effective algorithms to retrieve results from them. While it would be easy for one community to reject another for their limited ability to design a good SUI, the truth is that they all can, and they all have made valuable contributions. Fundamentally, therefore, we must accept that designing a great SUI means leveraging the knowledge and skills from all of these communities. The aim of this book is to at least acknowledge, if not integrate, all of these perspectives to bring the reader into a multidisciplinary mindset for how we should think about SUI design. Further, this book aims to provide the reader with a framework for thinking about how different innovations each contribute to the overall design of a SUI. With this framework and a multidisciplinary perspective in hand, the book then continues by reviewing: early, successful, established, and experimental concepts for SUI design. The book then concludes by discussing how we can analyse and evaluate the on-going developments in SUI design, as this multidisciplinary area of research moves forwards. Finally, in reviewing these many SUIs and SUI features, the book finishes by extracting a series of 20 SUI design recommendations that are listed in the conclusions. Table of Contents: Introduction / Searcher-Computer Interaction / Early Search User Interfaces / Modern Search User Interfaces / Experimental Search User Interfaces / Evaluating Search User Interfaces / Conclusions
Max L. Wilson is a Lecturer in HCI and Information Seeking, in the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University, UK. His research focuses on Search User Interface design, taking a multidisciplinary perspective from both Human-Computer Interaction (the presentation and interaction) and Information Science (the information and seeking behaviours). His doctoral work, which won the best JASIST article in 2009, focused on evaluating Search User Interfaces using models of Information Seeking. Max received his PhD from Southampton University, under the supervision of M.C. Schraefel and Dame Wendy Hall, where much of his work was grounded in supporting Exploratory Search, and within the developing context of Web Science. Max mainly publishes in HCI and Information Science communities, including a monograph with co-authors Schraefel, Kules, and Shneiderman on future Search User Interfaces for the Web, and book chapters on Search User Interface design and Casual-Leisure Information Behaviour. Given the social evolution of the Web, and his interest in Web Science, some of Max's more recent work has focused on how people use social media, especially microblogging, as an information source. Max's research has been published at ACM CHI, ACM UIST, AAAI Conferenceon Weblogs and Social media, ACM JCDL, and Hypertext, and in journals including JASIST and Information Processing & Management. Max reviews for several journals and conferences, and has been on the organising committee for CHI2010, CHI2011, IliX2010, IliX2012, and ICWSM2012. Max is also leading the RepliCHI project, focusing on how the CHI community currently manages the replicability of HCI research. Finally, Max co-chairs the euroHCIR workshops aimed at stimulating the European communities interested in Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval.
