Information seekers often want 'something just like this', an information object (song, book, movie) like one they already know about. This approach is the premise of many modern recommender systems, which ask information seekers for examples of things they like in order to return similar things. This type of information seeking, though, is not particularly well supported by search engines, partly because the ways in which objects can be alike are multifaceted and difficult to articulate, partly because the analogue might emerge in the process of information seeking. This approach to information seeking has been touched on repeatedly in information science literature but not examined in detail. In this paper, we present a pair of studies that explore both how people seek information using analogues online and the ways in which information objects might be alike. Our results offer a novel understanding of a previously underexplored but common behaviour, addressing how analogues are identified, how they are used in information seeking, and the ways in which objects can be analogous from an information seeker's perspective. Our work can support the development of recommender systems, conversational search approaches, and digital interfaces that support this common but little-examined type of information seeking.

We explore a range of different metaphors used for Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) by designers, end-users, manufacturers, and researchers using a novel framework derived from semi-structured interviews and a literature review. We focus less on the well-established idea of metaphors as a way for interface designers to help novice users learn how to interact with novel technology, and more on other ways metaphors can be used. We find that metaphors people use are contextually fluid, can change with the mode of conversation, and can reveal differences in how people perceive VUIs compared to other devices. Not all metaphors are helpful, and some may be offensive. Analyzing this broader class of metaphors can help understand, perhaps even predict problems. Metaphor analysis can be a low-cost tool to inspire design creativity and facilitate complex discussions about sociotechnical issues, enabling us to spot potential opportunities and problems in the situated use of technologies.

If reading was simply ingesting information, it would not matter what format that information arrived in-whether it be digital, poor quality newsprint, or the most beautiful hardback book. We do make choices about our reading, though, based on other factors than informational content. Some of these have been discussed in the literature, including convenience, preferences between paper and screen, and acquisition preferences. In this paper, we discuss books and reading as a performance. We examine the visual and cultural elements of books that influence the decisions we make about privacy or performance. We use these reflections to suggest a new form of information interaction, and make suggestions for a future program of research to support this new interaction.

Abstract We present a new paradigm to address the persistence of difficulties that people have in accessing and using information. Our idea consists of two main aspects: engaging wider society with usability and distributing the topic across disciplines. We claim that bad usability is a social justice issue. Primarily, we propose that usability should become the subject of widespread activism across society, enabling more people to realize that their usability problems are not due to inadequacies in themselves but in current designs. People should be encouraged and enabled to complain about their experiences with an expectation of improvements. We also propose that the current restriction of this topic to certain disciplinary units is overly narrow and that instead there should be radical embedding of usability concepts across many different fields and settings. We believe that the usability of information systems is core to information science and that information scientists should resume their historic role as heralds and pioneers of human–computer interaction.

With greater access to computational resources, people use search to address many everyday challenges in their lives, including solving technology problems. Although there are now many useful ‘how-to’ resources online (especially videos on YouTube), it can still be difficult to identify, understand, and resolve certain kinds of technical problem. While research tasks have been studied for many years and we know the tactics people use, we know far less about searchers’ tactics for how-to technical tasks that involve actually being able to apply found information to resolve a problem. Crucial to our study was developing and studying a highly realistic, how-to technical task, for which there was no single guidance resource: making a phone safe for a child. After providing 39 participants with an actual phone to fix, and a search engine to perform the task, we analysed their search tactics using retrospective cued think aloud interviews. Our primary contribution is a set of 77 tactics used, in three categories, along with detail of how common they were. We conclude that people had a lot of tactics in their repertoire. Although it was not hard for participants to find relevant information, what was hard was for participants to find information they could use; indeed only 23% of participants successfully completed the entire task. Domain knowledge affected the choice of tactics used (although not necessarily towards better task success). We discuss these influences and make design recommendations for how future search systems can support those in resolving how-to technical tasks.

If scientific research can be described as "arm's length'' cooperative work, then the sciences engaged in the creation and maintenance of cooperatively built classification systems might be said to require extremely long arms; workers must reach across great distances of time, space and awareness to independently contribute to the creation and maintenance of a conceptual infrastructure. This is particularly the case for the field of biological taxonomy, in which researchers across the globe have, for more than three hundred years, cooperatively developed a massive knowledge organization system describing all life on earth. As taxonomists move from paper-based workflows to born-digital, data-first modes of publishing, new tools and approaches are needed to support their work. In this paper, we present research conducted as part of the "Transforming Taxonomic Interfaces" project aimed at improving interfaces for taxonomic software. We describe biological taxonomy in the context of CSCW, and identify key strategies taxonomists deploy to facilitate loosely coupled cooperative work. We also contribute a discussion of semantic refactoring, a unique kind of "articulation work'' entailed in developing, maintaining, and migrating classification systems. This work has implications for the design and study of knowledge organization systems and infrastructure, classification research, and for the development of general semantic web tools and software as well as those specifically for biological taxonomy.

The characterization of scholarly communication is dominated by citation‐based measures. In this paper we propose several metrics to describe different facets of open access and open research. We discuss measures to represent the public availability of articles along with their archival location, licenses, access costs, and supporting information. Calculations illustrating these new metrics are presented using the authors’ publications. We argue that explicit measurement of openness is necessary for a holistic description of research outputs.

We draw on the idea of the reflective practitioner to consider how end users can directly contribute to user experience design discussions in open source projects. People with expertise in their own use context but without programming or user experience analysis and design skills can provide reflections on personal experiences.

The nature of the available information and its role in our lives have changed significantly, but the methods and tools that are used to access and share that information in collaboration have remained largely unaltered. Within the GROUP/CSCW community, the area of collaborative information seeking/retrieval/behavior (CIS/CIR/CIB) has drawn a new stream of interest to it in the recent years. This has been possible due to involvement and initiatives of several prominent researchers from various fields, such as IR, HCI, LIS, and CSCW. This workshop is aimed to take these efforts to the next level by focusing on theories and models that are grounded in the literature and existing empirical studies, as well as applications and tools that help us advance the field further. We are interested in bringing together a group of researchers working on various conceptual and technical aspects of collaborative information seeking, search, retrieval, and sensemaking. The workshop will provide an excellent opportunity to share your work-in-progress, seek valuable feedback from your fellow researchers, and start or strengthen collaborative endeavors.

Help-giving interactions in open source technical support often involve more people than the conventional help-giver help-seeker pair. Contributions include lightweight but useful me-too contributions from fellow help-seekers. Problems with the reuse of help documentation may be resolved by contextualized discussions, and those discussions themselves are found to be substantially reused.

Research on Web mashups and visual languages share an interest in human-centered computing. Both research communities are concerned with supporting programming by everyday, technically inexpert users. Visual programming environments have been a focus for both communities, and we believe that there is much to be gained by further discussion between these research communities. In this paper we explore some connections between web mashups and visual languages, and try to identify what each might be able to learn from the other. Our goal is to establish a framework for a dialog between the communities, and to promote the exchange of ideas and our respective understandings of human-centered computing.

Abstract The classic problem within the information quality (IQ) research and practice community has been the problem of defining IQ. It has been found repeatedly that IQ is context sensitive and cannot be described, measured, and assured with a single model. There is a need for empirical case studies of IQ work in different systems to develop a systematic knowledge that can then inform and guide the construction of context‐specific IQ models. This article analyzes the organization of IQ assurance work in a large‐scale, open, collaborative encyclopedia—Wikipedia. What is special about Wikipedia as a resource is that the quality discussions and processes are strongly connected to the data itself and are accessible to the general public. This openness makes it particularly easy for researchers to study a particular kind of collaborative work that is highly distributed and that has a particularly substantial focus, not just on error detection but also on error correction. We believe that the study of those evolving debates and processes and of the IQ assurance model as a whole has useful implications for the improvement of quality in other more conventional databases.

Creativity support tools are set an especially difficult task when they are applied to art/science collaboration. Not because of any fundamental incompatibility between the disciplines, but because creativity support tools are rarely supple enough to manage dramatically shifting requirements at various stages of design or handle the diversity of artifacts that might be generated. Traditional methods of evaluation of collaborative support tools may not address these aspects. This workshop aims to examine three specific areas open to expanded modes of evaluation; the social aspects of tools and tool use, how artifacts are created and manipulated in support tools, and how the expanding contexts of art/science collaborations may be rapidly changing support tool requirements.

Many collaborative design tools may suffer from being too generic to address the specific complexities inherent in multidisciplinary collaboration. We provide accounts of several multidisciplinary HCI courses at our institution, elaborating on the challenges student teams face when integrating design practice from a wide variety of disciplines. Of particular interest are the distinct approaches that these multidisciplinary teams adopt that differ from more common forms of collaborative design. We suggest reasons for the poor rate of adoption of existing collaborative support tools and outline specific suggestions for directions in both ethnographic studies of multidisciplinary collaboration and collaborative systems design.

We explore the use of abstracted screenshots as part of a new help interface. Graphstract, an implementation of a graphical help system, extends the ideas of textually oriented Minimal Manuals to the use of screenshots, allowing multiple small graphical elements to be shown in a limited space. This allows a user to get an overview of a complex sequential task as a whole. The ideas have been developed by three iterations of prototyping and evaluation. A user study shows that Graphstract helps users perform tasks faster on some but not all tasks. Due to their graphical nature, it is possible to construct Graphstracts automatically from pre-recorded interactions. A second study shows that automated capture and replay is a low-cost method for authoring Graphstracts, and the resultant help is as understandable as manually constructed help.

Abstract One cannot manage information quality (IQ) without first being able to measure it meaningfully and establishing a causal connection between the source of IQ change, the IQ problem types, the types of activities affected, and their implications. In this article we propose a general IQ assessment framework. In contrast to context‐specific IQ assessment models, which usually focus on a few variables determined by local needs, our framework consists of comprehensive typologies of IQ problems, related activities, and a taxonomy of IQ dimensions organized in a systematic way based on sound theories and practices. The framework can be used as a knowledge resource and as a guide for developing IQ measurement models for many different settings. The framework was validated and refined by developing specific IQ measurement models for two large‐scale collections of two large classes of information objects: Simple Dublin Core records and online encyclopedia articles.

We explore the application of a wiki-based technology and style of interaction to enabling the incremental translation of a collaborative application into a number of different languages, including variant English language interfaces better suited to the needs of particular user communities. The development work allows us to explore in more detail the design space of functionality and interfaces relating to tailoring, customization, personalization and localization, and the challenges of designing to support ongoing incremental contributions by members of different use communities.

At first glance it can look like Open Source Software development violates many, if not all, of the precepts of decades of careful research and teaching in Software Engineering. One could take a classic SE textbook and compare the activities elaborated and advocated in the various chapters with what is actually done in plain sight in the public logs of an OSS project in say SourceForge. For a Professor of Software Engineering this might make for rather depressing reading. Are the principles of SE being rendered obsolete? Has OSS really discovered Brooks' Silver Bullet? Or is it just a flash in the pan or Fool's Gold.In this talk I will mainly look at one aspect of Open Source Development, the 'problem' of creating usable interfaces, particularly for non-technical end-users. Any approach involves the challenge of how to coordinate distributed collaborative interface analysis and design, given that in conventional software development this is usually done in small teams and almost always face to face. Indeed all the methods in any HCI text just assume same-time same-place work and don't map to distributed work, let alone the looser mechanisms of OSS development. Instead what is needed is a form of participatory usability involving the coordination of end users and developers in a constantly evolving redesign process.

In a study of collaborative help-giving within several organizations settings, we identified two forms of trouble and bewilderment that we explore further in this paper. In one case, the user is confused about where they, their files, or other resources are within a larger technical infrastructure (Where am I?). In the second case, the user isn't sure which login is needed and which actions are allowed (Who am I?). We believe that these issues carry important implications for the design of interfaces that can explicitly support repair and problem-solving, and that they are essential to consider in the development of CSCW and ubiquitous computing applications.

The similarities among three independent studies, conducted by the authors, of informal learning in computer-supported collaboration in three different contexts are presented: (1) university undergraduates playing multiplayer videogames; (2) elementary school children playing "edutainment games" on a classroom computer during free choice time; and (3) adult computer users offering informal help-giving in a variety of workplace scenarios. These studies indicate that users often interacted in unexpected ways. Additionally, collaboration was both enabled and constrained by the participants' task and social goals. Issues such as the blurred distinction between play, work, and learning and design implications are discussed.

This paper presents an analysis of written and electronic records that document the collaborative process of packing museum artifacts in preparation for a move. The majority of data recorded detailed the process of packing, while only a small amount of the data concerned which artifacts were packed in which boxes. Museum staff members were able to use these process data to solve the numerous errors that occurred during packing. We explore the design implications for collaborative systems which focus on supporting error recovery rather than error prevention.

This paper describes ethnomethodologically informed ethnography (EM) as a methodology for information science research, illustrating the approach with the results of a study in a university library. We elucidate major differences between the practical orientation of EM and theoretical orientation of other ethnographic approaches in information science research. We address ways in which EM may be used to inform systems design and consider the issues that arise in coordinating the results of this research with the needs of information systems designers. We outline our approach to the “ethnographically informed” development of information systems in addressing some of the major problems of interdisciplinary work between system designers and EM researchers.

Information retrieval systems should acknowledge the existence of collaboration in the search process. Collaboration can help users to be more effective in both learning systems and in using them. We consider how to build systems that more actively support collaboration. We describe a system that embodies just one kind of explicit support; a graphical representation of the search process that can be manipulated and discussed by users. A consideration of this system leads to an analysis of designing systems to support coping behaviour by users; including the need to support both help-giving by people, and recovery from the failure of intelligent agents. We also discuss the idea of interfaces as notations for supporting dialogues between people.

No abstract available.

This paper discusses an evaluation of the MEAD prototype, a multi-user interface generator tool particularly for use in the context of Air Traffic Control (ATC). The procedures we adopted took the form of opportunistic and informal evaluation sessions with small user groups, including Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs). We argue that informal procedures are a powerful and cost effective method for dealing with specific evaluation issues in the context of CSCW but that wider issues are more problematic. Most notably, identifying the “validity” or otherwise of CSCW systems requires that the context of use be taken seriously, necessitating a fundamental re-appraisal of the concept of evaluation.

Experiences from an interdisciplinary project involving software engineers and sociologists are reported. The project is concerned with discovering the requirements of a user interface to a flight database which is used to provide real-time information to air-traffic controllers. The sociologists are conducting an ethnographic analysis of the activity of air-traffic control, and this is being used for the development of a prototype system. An overview of the project is given, the contribution of sociologists to requirements engineering is discussed, and tool support which will allow ethnographic observations to be integrated into the requirements engineering process is suggested.>