Tutorial Description

The usability, user experience and ultimate utility of interactive information retrieval (IIR) and digital library (DL) systems are heavily influenced by the quality of the user interface and its interaction design. Researchers from the DL or IIR community often underestimate this effect and understandably have difficulty to apply the complex body of design knowledge and models from the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Visualization (IV) on to their systems and application domains.

This half-day tutorial will offer practical guidance, an introduction into helpful models and processes, design examples and success stories from HCI and IV to deliver a crash-course and inspiration. The tutorial will focus on those, who would like to improve their IIR or DL user interfaces or would like to create whole new user experiences for their interactive systems. This will cover traditional desktop DL on personal computers, but will also touch new interaction devices, e.g. DL and IIR for mobile devices, multi-touch enabled tabletops, tangible user interfaces or smart environments. Beside the traditional Windows Icons Menus Pointing (WIMP) paradigm a new paradigm called Reality-Based Interaction (RBI) will be presented. RBI employs themes of reality such as users’ understanding of naïve physics, their own bodies, the surrounding environment, and other people. They thereby attempt to make computer interaction more like interacting with the real, non-digital world.

The tutorial will not expect any prior knowledge of HCI and IV in the target audience, but will disseminate the necessary knowledge from these fields to the ECDL 2009 audience. The targeted audience is researchers and practitioners who are involved into the design, development or evaluation of IIR or DL systems and who would like to enhance their knowledge about ways to improve their user interfaces or who seek for inspirations and methods for better design.

As a special service to the audience, participants will be encouraged to submit links to their systems and user interfaces in advance of the tutorial (e-mail to Hans-Christian Jetter). Selected systems will then be discussed in a closing plenum within the tutorial giving the participants the great opportunity to receive specific first-hand suggestions for redesign and improvement based on the years of design experience of the tutorial organizers and tutors.

Organizers:

• Harald Reiterer, Human-Computer Interaction Group, University of Konstanz. Harald Reiterer is head of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Department of Computer & Information Science of the University of Konstanz. He has now 20 years of research experience in Usability Engineering and Interaction Design. His research focus in the field of Visual Information Seeking Systems is to combine the power of visualizations with new interaction paradigms to develop user interfaces, which allow a new quality of user experience [9]. Since 1999 he has been involved in different national (e.g. DFG project MedioVis, Mobile Information Visualization) and EU research projects (e.g. INSYDER, INVISIP, DELOS) researching the design and evaluation of user interfaces for IIR. He is author of more then 100 publications in journals, proceedings, and books.
• Hans-Christian Jetter, Human-Computer Interaction Group, University of Konstanz. Hans-Christian Jetter (M.Sc.) has been researching the design and evaluation of visual information seeking systems and digital library user interfaces in course of different national and EU research projects since 2003. As project leader of the DFG project MedioVis, he has been integrating next generation user interfaces (e.g. the HyperGrid) into the practice of information seeking in the Library of the University of Konstanz until 2007. More recently he has been focusing on researching and teaching embodied and reality-based interaction for information seeking, e.g. with mobile or tabletop devices using shared visual workplaces based on the ZOIL (Zoomable Object-Oriented Information Landscape) approach.

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