2013 in Review: Search Interaction Optimization

On January 1, 2013 I started my PhD studies at Chemnitz University of Technology in cooperation with Unister GmbH, Leipzig. My project is about automatic methods for optimizing search engine results pages (e.g., http://www.google.com/#q=Hello%2C+World!) with respect to result quality and interface usability. The official working title is Search Interaction Optimization: A Design Thinking Approach.

During my first year as a PhD student, I have published three papers (as first author). A full paper about my first milestone has been presented at the International Conference on Knowledge and Information Management (CIKM), which was held in San Francisco in October/November.¹ This milestone was about deducing the relevance of search results from user interactions on the search engine results page. Using large amounts of anonymous interaction data from two real-world hotel booking portals, we could show that it is possible to learn according relevance models of reasonable quality.

A second (short) paper was presented at the PhD Symposium of the International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE) in July.² The paper addressed the attempt of learning a common model that predicts usability based on training data from a group of similar webpages (e.g., online news articles). However, we concluded that this is not easily possible, because differences in low-level page structure and user intention counter model precision. Thus, additional preprocessing steps are necessary to minimze these influences. The usability evaluation described in this paper was based on a novel instrument for measuring usability whose items have been specifically designed for correlation with client-side interaction features. This Interface Usability Instrument (Inuit) was presented at the workshop “Methodological Approaches to HCI” in September.³ The above described is part of the second milestone of my PhD project, which is about automatic methods for optimizing interface usability. This milestone is my current work-in-progress and will be finished in 2014.

Alright, so much for my research in 2013. I’ll keep you updated with more fine-grained results during the new year.

¹ Speicher, Both, Gaedke: “TellMyRelevance! Predicting the Relevance of Web Search Results from Cursor Interactions” (http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2505515.2505703).
² Speicher, Both, Gaedke: “Was that Webpage Pleasant to Use? Predicting Usability Quantitatively from Interactions” (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04244-2_33).
³ Speicher, Both, Gaedke: “Towards Metric-based Usability Evaluation of Online Web Interfaces” (http://dl.mensch-und-computer.de/handle/123456789/3399).