What Is UI?
dataresultintentionattention
Effective, timely access to relevant information!
Ensure rapid task completion.
Deliver results as quickly as possible.
Interpret query, and rank results.
Metric: Task Completion
Interpret user intent,
Retrieve relevant information,
Present it effectively to enable task completion.
Metric: Time to completion.
Return results as quickly as possible.
Return fresh information.
Present information to be immediately accessible.
Metric: Successful task completion.—
Holy grail: perfect recall.
Effective search is an accessibility win.
Serve users in the long tail!
Serve content in the long tail.
Serve users in the long tail.
Goal: Rapid task completion.
User interfaces for rapid task completion.
Adapt to user’s needs and abilities.
Serving users in the long tail:
Serve results so they are immediately usable.
Identify content that matches user’s needs.
Task at hand.
User interaction modality in use.
Retrieve, format and serve result appropriately.
Observations that led to Accessible Search:
Common queries, e.g., weather answered equally well by many Web documents.
Pick most appropriate result based on user’s access needs.
Success metric: Rapid task completion.
Experiment: Use accessibility as a secondary metric.
Identified a set of key HTML features to measure accessibility.
Built a linear classifier using these features.
Used standard machine learning techniques to tune the weights in the classifier.
Classifier computed an accessibility score in the range [-1,1]
Used accessibility metric as a secondary signal.
Launched Accessible Search as a CSE — Custom Search Engine.
Classifier continuously tuned based on user feedback and performance.
Success Metric: Timely task completion.
Why Accessible Search remains a Labs experiment:
Met original goal of matching results to user’s needs.
Concept difficult to communicate to end-users.
Google search has always worked well for blind users.
Users reluctant to switch to a specialized result set.
Consequence: Accessible Search is not used heavily.
Efficient UI for rapid task completion.
Enables users to move through results with the keyboard.
Traverse result set as a continuous scroll.
Navigating results automatically speaks the snippet.
Pressing enter opens current result.
Keyboard access to advanced search tools including filters.
Accessible Views is an opt-in UI experiment.
Challenge: Rapid task completion on mobile devices.
Format results to suit mobile displays.
Serve results that are optimized for small devices.
Augment with voice interaction.
Mobile: Just a different access challenge!
1Vox —Your voice is my command!
Use voice search to input query.
Speak relevant information.
No context-switch.
Accessibility: A band-width problem!
user’s attention span goes down.
User’s display size goes down.
User’s network band-width goes down.
Search is crucial to effective human-computer interaction!
Visual displays optimized for rapid scanning.
Search essential for compensating in eyes-free interaction.
Every aspect of the user interface needs to be searchable!
Search enables immediate random access!
What is a user interface anyway?
Collect user input to interpret user intent.
Format response to capture user attention.
Good Search = Light-weight User Interface
task completion remains the metric to optimize.
Accessibility is about tailoring the interface to match user needs.
Effective search is a means toward minimizing user interaction.
