(Part 2 - the online system wouldn't let me post all of this in one go) I also found that it was not a good idea to tailor the macrostructural elements to the users too much - this often gave misleading information about the content so people ended up choosing documents that were less likely to satisfy or satisfice their needs. Communicating the macrostructure without reference to users' contexts was important for them to make good judgements about which documents to read or not which is where I part ways with Google's way of making a search engine returns page. They prefer to reflect users' contexts back to them (seeing the keywords embedded in the summary) which led to more inaccurate judgements that providing information removed from their context (eg, the document title). This finding was replicated with different designs so I'm quite confident of it.
I guess a lot of this depends upon your users. If you are designing for a bunch of academics, then abstracts are the best things to use because they are familiar with reading through many. Satisficing the needs of regular end-users is different again. My research also found that (contrary to Pirolli & Card's paper) that negative information scent can exist - this is when something that is definitely off-track, so for example like when searching for statistics algorithms and coming across a link to a site selling various drugs online. From what I recall, they felt that there was a continuum between positive scent or neutral scent whereas I found that people were actively repelled by some content. Hope this helps and doesn't have too many errors - it's been a few years since I covered this stuff in any detail. Email me if anything is unclear or incorrect. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=43708 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
