SNS College of Engineering

HCI AND THE WEB

Presented by,
S.Yamuna
AP/CSE
INTRODUCTION

 Web users are ubiquitous

 Web usability problems have clear relationship with
sales
 Web users are largely discretionary users
 The web is evolving at a rapid pace
 Website technical development is easy

HCI AND THE WEB 2

WHAT MAKES THE WEB HARD TO
USE?
 Unpleasant or unproductive experience /impossible
for others
 Imprecise in results
 Poor presentation
 Technical flaws
 Broken links

HCI AND THE WEB 3

WHAT MAKES THE WEB HARD TO
USE?
 Browsing and linking
 Finding things
 Search and query on the web

 Relevance

 User interface issues

 Context of use

 Navigation issues

HCI AND THE WEB 4

HYPERMEDIA – not just text

 hypertext systems + additional media

 illustrations, photographs, video and sound

 links/hotspots may be in media

 areas of pictures

 times and locations in video

 also called multimedia

 but term also used for simple audio/video

HCI AND THE WEB 5

BROWSING AND LINKING:
what’s wrong with the WWW?
 Importance of hypermedia in the structuring of
information
 To provide Personalized information

 Improves productivity

 Personalization of links by
 Annotation

 Computation

 overviews

HCI AND THE WEB 6

ANNOTATIONS

 A standard or easily accessible web service.

 Mosaic browser supported the creation of annotations
at both personal and group level
 In a “writeable web” where personalized links and
annotations are easily supported
 Example
 to improve or adapt its contents by

adding/removing material, something like a wiki.

HCI AND THE WEB 7

Example for Annotation
Diigo
 Add notes and in-page
highlights
 Store, Tag along with your
notes and highlights
 Create groups (i.e. private
group for team members)
 Subscribe to specific
webpages notes

HCI AND THE WEB 8

Private links

 If on creates a web page, complete with links, then

those links are available as the content
 Example
 User bookmarks

Local overview
 Not provided as standard web service but as a specific
courtesy page optionally supplied by site managers

HCI AND THE WEB 9

Problems

 Inaccessible to non-specialist users

 The cost of assimilating the technology outweigh the
perceived benefits
 Readers learn to make use of the available tools
instead of demanding better tools.

HCI AND THE WEB 10

Finding things
i) Searching and querying
 The most common web tool to get information is
search engine.
 Query
 Problems:
 Confusion and uncertainty surrounding query information
 Impenetrability of seemingly endless results

HCI AND THE WEB 11

Finding things
ii) Relevance
 Most information systems are designed for
hypothetical “average” user
 One size fits for all approach
 It ignores all diversity like cultural and educational
backgrounds, abilities, objectives and aspirations .

HCI AND THE WEB 12

PERSONALIZATION

 Delivering content specific to the requirements of

different users
 Tailoring of content for either as individual or for a
group of people
 Personalization can be used to create communities of
common interest.
 “on the fly” no additional costs to the publishers

HCI AND THE WEB 13

USER INTERFACE ISSUES

 Context plays important part in the personalization

and links.
 Context needed to be considered in any environment.
 Context of use

 Navigation issues

HCI AND THE WEB 14

CONTEXT OF USE

 relevant constraints of the communicative situation

that influence language use, language variation, and
discourse summary
 Designers must consider the wide range of
environment
 88% of UK web users access internet primarily from
home.
 Others use internet through Mobile or PDA’s

HCI AND THE WEB 15

NAVIGATION ISSUES

 Common difficulties faced by web users are

download time and the navigation
 Download time – governed by the technical
capabilities of internet connections together with
clear design variables.
 Navigation –more complex
 Between one third and one half of the time spent using a
computer is unproductive due to problems in web
navigation

HCI AND THE WEB 16

NAVIGATION ISSUES

 Planning routes
 Generating a suitable plan
 Following routes
 Execute subsequent point by point decisions
 Orienting within the space
 People have to sense their current location
 Learning the space
 Repeated exposure to any large scale environment will lead
to deepening knowledge of objects within the space.

HCI AND THE WEB 17

BROWSING AND LINKING

 Fundamental mechanism for viewing information on

the web by browsing implemented by hypermedia
links.

 But still it has some difficulties

HCI AND THE WEB 18

BROKEN AND MISDIRECTEDLINKS
 A link which does not work any more.
 Broken links can be frustrating for the user, resulting
in loss of interest in the website.
 Externalizing links – links are stored separately from
the data
 Preventative- creating a infrastructure or procedure
that avoid broken links
 Corrective-correcting broken links
 Adaptive- never storing actual links, only storing the
instructions for making them
HCI AND THE WEB 19
CORRECTIVE SOLUTIONS
 More robust
 Aim to discover the new
location for the linked
document(relevant
information sites).
 Detect and attempt to
correct links , discard them
or notify the user of the
problem.
 Discard unfixable links

HCI AND THE WEB 20

PERSONALIZING LINKS

 Personalize links regardless of source, type or

ownership of the data.

HCI AND THE WEB 21

PERSONALIZED LINKS

 Users have different needs and an author of web page

cannot anticipate all such requirements.
 Provide links over data not owned by the user was
available.
 Offering private means for recording ideas ought to
become a priority for future web browser
development

HCI AND THE WEB 22

SEARCHING AND QUERYING

 Experts agree that the

typical user will
experience difficulties
when attempting to
formulate an effective
query.
 3-significant factors:
 Low user commitment.
 Uncertain information
need.
 Difficulties in expression.
HCI AND THE WEB 23
LOW USER COMMITMENT

 In this world, people in hurry, use web search

engines and give two word queries to be run
against billions of web pages.
 We expect and get a sub-second results.

HCI AND THE WEB 24

UNCERTAIN INFORMATION NEEDS

 Searches normally start out with an unrefined or

vague information need which becomes more sharply
focused as their search continues and exposure to
information changes their information need.

HCI AND THE WEB 25

DIFFICULTIES IN EXPRESSION

 Expect in special circumstances, it is difficult for a

user to ask an information retrieval system for what
they want, because the user dos not know what is
available
 For successful query requires awareness of
information-retrieval theory.

HCI AND THE WEB 26

RELEVANCE FEEDBACK

 To overcome some of the above problems,

researches developed strategies,
1. Initial query
2. Relevant and Non-relevant web pages
3. Modifies
4. New result submitted to the user
5. Continues until user satisfies

HCI AND THE WEB 27

THE RESULT LIST

 User submits broad query resulting in too large

documents.
 Leads to “ABUNDANCE PROBLEM”-the number
of pages that could reasonably be returned as
relevant is far too large.
 Solution:
a. Community-based ranking algorithm
b. Improved visual interface
c. Document Clustering

HCI AND THE WEB 28

COMMUNITY BASED RANKING
ALGORITHM
 A search engine ranks a set of web pages in order of
their likelihood that they will be relevant to the user
information need, most likely appears first.
 Calculated using a statistical measure related to the
occurrence of the query terms “term frequency”.
 It represents a purely arithmetical evaluation of the
web pages concerned.

HCI AND THE WEB 29

IMPROVED VISUAL INTERFACE

 The user’s mental load from slower, thought intensive

processes such as reading to faster ,perceptual
processes such as pattern recognition.
 It is easier to compare bars in a graph than numbers
on a list.
 Color is very useful for helping people quickly select
one particular word or object from a sea of others.

HCI AND THE WEB 30

DOCUMENT CLUSTERING

 The process of generalizing a set of results begins

with identifying particular commonalities shared by
some member of that set.
 Web pages similar are grouped together under a
single category or heading and the user is
subsequently presented several clusters of web pages.
 The number of clusters is low it reduces the load of
studying the results.

HCI AND THE WEB 31

PERSONALIZATION,PORTALS AND
COMMUNITIES
 It is difficult for a user (Content Consumer) to find
what they are looking for, difficult for authors
(Content Providers) to prevent their pages from being
lost in the crowd.
 DESIGN APPROACHES:
 PERSONALIZATION,
 PORTALS,
 COMMUNITIES.

HCI AND THE WEB 32

PERSONALIZATION

 The contents of the websites are changed so that the

materials appropriate for the needs and requirements
of the individual.
 Eg: Amazon.com stores information about the
customer’s interest gleaned from various sources to
generate a personalized home page and suggest items
that are likely to be of interest.
Eg: Educational adaptive system (AEH) uses the
web for teaching and learning.

HCI AND THE WEB 33

ADAPTIVE AND ADAPTABLE SYSTEM

 This is the two main approaches of Personalization.

 Adaptive system: Dynamically organize their
contents to meet the perceived needs of the user.
 This is transparent and does not require any
intervention of the user.
 Adaptable System: It make changes to the content
only as the result of the explicit intervention of the
user.

HCI AND THE WEB 34

METHODS AND MODELS OF
ADAPTATION
 The approaches to implementing adaptation on the
web, at the level of either content or linking.
 The adaptive presentation operates on text, although
in principle any media type may be adapted.
 Adaptive linking has five categories:
 Direct guidance
 Link sorting
 Link hiding
 Link annotation
 Map Adaptation
HCI AND THE WEB 35
CONT…

 Direct guidance: System makes recommendation as

to the next node to visit. Used for “guided tour” type
of direction for novice users.
 Link sorting: The ordering of links is changed so that
the most appropriate one is at the head of the list.
 Link Hiding: Inappropriate links are not displayed.
 Link Annotation: Visual clues gives user some idea
about the system.
 Map-Adaptation: Navigational map generated
according to adaptation rules.

HCI AND THE WEB 36

USER MODELING

 A user model is simply a set of rules that adaptive

system use to make decisions about relevance.
 MODELS:
 STEREOTYPE MODEL: Users are grouped together
with other like-minded individuals.
 OVERLAY MODEL: The individuals
knowledge,background and any other relevant data
are overlaid onto the sum of all knowledge in the
system.

HCI AND THE WEB 37

AUTHORING

 There are number of potentially difficult issues that

need to be concentrated when designing authoring
interface for adaptive system.
 When authoring a conventional web pages, the author
concentrates on content.
 Depending upon the adaptation model that is used,
what author sees might be different from what any
given end user sees.

HCI AND THE WEB 38

PORTALS

 A common way to gain a personalized experience of

the web is the use of portals.
 These are the gateways to online resources, a set of
links that provide starting point for web use.
 They are usually adaptable, allowing for explicit
selections of user interface options.
 Many portals have their roots in either Inter
directories or search engines and a common model of
a portal user interface.

HCI AND THE WEB 39

COMMUNITIES

 The Internet has its roots in communities, in creating

links and bridging geographic, cultural or temporal
barriers.
 Communities on the web are often supported by or
generated through, portals.
 Portals, especially those that are intranet based, are
often designed to support communities.
 Weblogs: It allow a user to post material which can
be citied, commented upon and redistributed
throughout the internet.

HCI AND THE WEB 40

CONT…

 These blogs require no specific knowledge of

authoring and are usually accessed with a standard
web browser.
 Wikis: These are community websites designed to
facilitate collaborative authoring. Eg:Wikipedia.

HCI AND THE WEB 41

SUMMARY

 Users of a search engine are overawed by the number

of results returned when a query is submitted.
 Even with these improvements, search engines are
still serving large chunks of unrefined information to
the users.
 This seems likely to change soon.

HCI AND THE WEB 42

CONCLUSION

 In this chapter we have considered HCI in a specific

web context, looking at the issues impeding smooth
user interaction with the web tools and documents.
 While some problems remain unsolved, generally the
usability of the web has improved greatly since its
early days.

HCI AND THE WEB 43

THANK YOU

HCI AND THE WEB 44