Although 1 person in 14 has dyslexia, most search interfaces are designed based on a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, creating inequity for neurodiverse searchers. This is also the case for mobile search, which accounts for most Google searches. While existing research has found search typically presents greater challenges for people with dyslexia, no prior work has examined how best to support them when searching on mobile devices. Rather than focus on addressing their search difficulties, we adopted an ability-based design approach. This involved designing a prototype, based on modifications to Google's mobile SERPs, aimed at enhancing their abilities – identified through interviews and observations with mobile searchers with dyslexia. A user evaluation found several of the modifications were useful; they supported searchers with dyslexia in making relevance judgements and boosted their resilience and self-efficacy. This research provides valuable insight into how to better support mobile searchers with dyslexia that can inform IIR research and design. It also demonstrates the potential of ability-based design approaches in supporting neurodiverse searchers.

Abstract Information is powerful; it can influence peoples' views and, in turn, their behavior. Much recent research and discussion on the role information plays in view change has focused on filter bubbles, echo chambers and misinformation and how they might influence what people think and how they act. However, no prior work has focused specifically on understanding the human information behavior (HIB) that drives and facilitates view change. We report findings from interviews with 18 people who recently changed views on issues they considered important. We found a tight symbiotic relationship between HIB and view change; passive information encountering sparked change, often spurring follow‐up active seeking and verification which progressed the change to a “point of no return,” supported making the change and reinforced the decision to change. When shared, information that contributed to the change sometimes sparked changes in others (as did expressing or debating the change), serving as an information encounter that perpetuated a cycle of HIB and view change. This understanding of the integral role of HIB in view change can inform policy and systems design to promote view change autonomy and a broader research agenda of understanding HIB to support democratic principles and values.

Abstract Creativity and verification are intrinsic to high‐quality journalism, but their role is often poorly visible in news story creation. Journalists face relentless commercial pressures that threaten to compromise story quality, in a digital era where their ethical obligation not to mislead the public has never been more important. It is therefore crucial to investigate how journalists can be supported to produce stories that are original, impactful, and factually accurate, under tight deadlines. We present findings from 14 semistructured interviews, where we asked journalists to discuss the creation of a recent news story to understand the process and associated human information behavior (HIB). Six overarching behaviors were identified: discovering, collecting, organizing, interrogating, contextualizing, and publishing. Creativity and verification were embedded throughout news story creation and integral to journalists' HIB, highlighting their ubiquity. They often manifested at a micro level; in small‐scale but vital activities that drove and facilitated story creation. Their ubiquitous role highlights the importance of creativity and verification support being woven into functionality that facilitates information acquisition and use in digital information tools for journalists.

Every year, many research projects are conducted within the field of interactive information retrieval on a broad diversity of users. Over the last few decades, an increasing number of studies have addressed user groups that may be defined as minority groups, such as people with disabilities. There is still a need for more studies on such user groups. The question, however, is how to conduct research on cohorts that might be regarded as 'vulnerable participants'. Previous research has showed that one cannot always conduct rigorous experiments for all types of users, and there are many issues to be raised in this regard, e.g ethical considerations. This tutorial addresses the responsibility of the researcher to consider how to conduct experiments where there might be a mismatch between rigour and ethics. Users with disabilities will be used as case studies, but many of the topics may have transfer value to other cohorts regarded as 'vulnerable participants'.

Despite the prevalence of dyslexia and the challenges it poses for seeking, assessing and using information, there has been relatively little research on the challenges people with dyslexia face when interacting with information. What existing research there is has mostly focused on the impact on information comprehension and spelling. However, people with dyslexia often face considerable memory impairment that can affect their learning. This paper reports findings from retrospective think-aloud (RTA) observations with 13 undergraduates with dyslexia, focusing on the memory-related barriers they face and the workarounds they use to overcome these barriers. An enhanced understanding of the full range of barriers faced by information-seekers with dyslexia can inform the design of dyslexia-aware digital information environments and information literacy programs. These can 'level the information playing field' by helping to break down barriers to information and, in turn, to knowledge creation.

There has been considerable hype about filter bubbles and echo chambers influencing the views of information consumers. The fear is that these technologies are undermining democracy by swaying opinion and creating an uninformed, polarised populace. The literature in this space is mostly techno-centric, addressing the impact of technology. In contrast, our work is the first research in the information interaction field to examine changing viewpoints from a human-centric perspective. It provides a new understanding of view change and how we might support informed, autonomous view change behaviour. We interviewed 18 participants about a self-identified change of view, and the information touchpoints they engaged with along the way. In this paper we present the information types and sources that informed changes of viewpoint, and the ways in which our participants interacted with that information. We describe our findings in the context of the techno-centric literature and suggest principles for designing digital information environments that support user autonomy and reflection in viewpoint formation.

Information seeking and access are essential for users in all walks of life, from addressing personal needs such as finding flights to locating information needed to complete work tasks. Over the past decade or so, the general needs of people with impairments have increasingly been recognized as something to be addressed, an issue embedded both in international treaties and in state legislation. The same tendency can be found in research, where a growing number of user studies including people with impairments have been conducted. The purpose of these studies is typically to uncover potential barriers for access to information, especially in the context of inaccessible search user interfaces. This literature review provides an overview of research on the information seeking and searching of users with impairments. The aim is to provide an overview to both researchers and practitioners who work with any of the user groups identified. Some diagnoses are relatively well represented in the literature (for instance, visual impairment), but there is very little work in other areas (for instance, autism) and in some cases no work at all (for instance, aphasia). Gaps are identified in the research, and suggestions are made regarding areas where further research is needed.

Designing user studies in the interactive information retrieval (IIR) paradigm on people with impairments may sometimes require different methodological considerations than for other users. Consequently, there may be a tension between what the community regards as being a rigorous methodology against what researchers can do ethically with their users. This paper discusses issues to consider when designing IIR studies involving people with dyslexia, such as sampling, informed consent and data collection. The conclusion is that conducting user studies on participants with dyslexia requires special considerations at all stages of the experimental design. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness and understanding in the research community about experimental methods involving users with dyslexia, and addresses researchers, as well as editors and reviewers. Several of the issues raised do not only apply to people with dyslexia, but have implications when researching other groups, for instance elderly people and users with learning, cognitive, sensory or motor impairments.

A key problem in the field of search interfaces is dyslexic users interaction with the UI. Dyslexia is a widespread specific learning difficult (SpLD) (10% of any population is estimated to have this cognitive disability) which is under researched in the field of information retrieval. The focus here is an analysis of the User Interface (UI) for search, using visual analytical methods on eye tracking data to examine the difference between control and dyslexic searchers. We use a number of visual analytic methods including path similarity analysis (PSA) and clustering of time intervals to demonstrate both similarities and differences between the user groups. Observations of videos are used to augment the visualizations. Results demonstrate a clear difference between the user groups, and a clear memory effect on the user of search interfaces is shown -- this is a key contribution of this paper. We examine the results using of theories of dyslexia, contributing also to the field of dyslexia and search.

At their heart, most if not all information retrieval models utilize some form of term frequency.The notion is that the more often a query term occurs in a document, the more likely it is that document meets an information need. We examine an alternative. We propose a model which assesses the presence of a term in a document not by looking at the actual occurrence of that term, but by a set of non-independent supporting terms, i.e. context. This yields a weighting for terms in documents which is different from and complementary to tf-based methods, and is beneficial for retrieval.

Examines the searching of partitioned inverted files with particular emphasis on issues that arise from different types of partitioning methods. Two types of index partitions are investigated, namely term identifier (TermId) partitioning and document identifier (DocId) partitioning. We describe the search operations implemented in order to support parallelism in probabilistic searching. We also describe higher-level features, such as search topologies, in parallel search methods. The results from runs on the two types of partitioning are compared and contrasted. We conclude that, within our framework, the DocId method is the best.