Section: New Results

Discovery Hub

Participants : Nicolas Marie, Fabien Gandon, Emilie Palagi, Alain Giboin.

In the context of the Discovery Hub project (http://www.discoveryhub.co ), we performed an ergonomic evaluation and redesign of the graphical and textual User Interfaces (UIs) displaying, and allowing to interact with, the explanations provided by Discovery Hub to justify the results it has retrieved. We did user tests of the existing UIs and designed several mockups improving the UIs by taking users’ feedback into account.

We also performed a user-centered evaluation of the quality of the results retrieved by the 4 algorithms of Discovery Hub. We decided to focus on the quality of the results and not on the UI. Thus, specific criteria of the quality of the results were defined in this evaluation: the surpriseness and the interestingness of the results. A result is considered as:

- surprising if the user discovers an unknown resource or relation between the topic searched and the selected result, or if she discovers something unexpected ;

- interesting if the user thinks it is similar to the topic explored or if she thinks she will remind or reuse it later on.

We are currently developing an ergonomic method for evaluating exploratory search systems (ESSs) in general. We are performing a first test of the method on Discovery Hub [41] .