Our paper “S.O.S.: Does Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Need Help?”—co-authors are Dr. Andreas Both (Unister) and Prof. Martin Gaedke (TU Chemnitz)—has been awarded a Best Paper Honarable Mention Award by ACM SIGCHI, the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction of the Association for Computing Machinery. According to Wikipedia, ACM SIGCHI is “the world’s leading organization in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), and essentially created and defined the field.”1 Our paper is to be presented at the 2015 edition of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems2, which is the premier conference in the field of HCI and takes place in Seoul, South Korea.
S.O.S., which is short for “SERP Optimization Suite”, is a tool for determining the usability of a SERP in terms of quantitative scores by analyzing user feedback and interactions. If suboptimal scores are detected for a certain factor of usability (e.g., readability), adjustments are automatically proposed based on a catalog of best practices (e.g., adjust font size, among others). The catalog contains sets of potential causes for suboptimal scores and maps them to sets of corresponding countermeasures. Determining usability scores is based on WaPPU.
S.O.S.’s GitHub repository can be found at https://github.com/maxspeicher/sos. It’s free for non-commercial use. Resources and results of the evaluation we describe in our paper are available at https://github.com/maxspeicher/sos-resources.
(CC BY trophy icon by icomoon.io.)
1 http://www.wikiwand.com/en/SIGCHI
2 http://chi2015.acm.org/program/best-of-chi/#honorable-mentions
2008 – Tales of Design & User Experience 