Story Search (Alex)

 

 

Arjun wants to talk to Raj, but Raj is busy. Arjun remembers the trip to Yosemite National Park that Raj told him about a few weeks back and wants to find out more about it. He logs into Teleport, and selects "Yosemite Park" from the stories that Raj has recorded in California. Arjun remembers Raj telling him about seeting a bear, and performs a search to see if Raj has any content that records that experience.

Arjun can now see the search results: In the "SEE" section of the results, Arjun can see that Raj has taken a picture of the bear and annotated it with a caption. Similarly, in the "READ" section, Arjun can see that Raj he has posted several tweets about seeing the bear.

Arjun now wants to know more about bears in the Yosemite area. Are bear sightings rare? Is Yosemite safe if there are bears all around? To do this, Arjun activates the "Explore" mode, and is shown interesting content relating to bears in Yosemite National Park. For example, Teleport pulls up a map of bear sightings in Yosemite that aggregates tweets like Raj's. It also brings up a list of news articles about bears that are published around Yosemite.

Learnability

  • The interface is extremely simple and does not require much of the user. Thus, we expect that this interface will be very learnable. 
  • The interface makes use of common affordances, like search bars and buttons.
  • General function of buttons is conveyed through use of externally consistent icons.
  • If users have not discussed all of the stories in the past (i.e. over email or in person), then the "Stories" section might be difficult to understand. The user might have to explore several stories until his finds the one that he is looking for.

Efficiency

  • The interface allows the user to search through stories efficiently by first selecting a location and a story. The user can also filter based on the type of content that he wants to see: visual, textual, or aggregate. This allows faster access to the type of content that the user is interested in.
  • If the use is unclear about what he is looking for, he can select "Explore" to see suggestions for content similar to what he has sought in the past. This allows the user to find relevant information automatically, rather than having to manually search the web based on "hints" from the stories he's heard.

Safety

  • Because the user interface is modal, it may be possible for the user to make mode errors. For example, say Arjun was looking at information about Bears, then suddenly wanted to look up a picture from Raj's trip to Stanford. Because the interface implicitly filters content based on the story that is currently selected, the search would not return anything, perhaps leading Arjun to falsely believe that Raj has not posted anything about Stanford. To make mode errors less likely, the interface provides visual feedback that indicates which mode is currently activated.
  • The search bar will provide an autocomplete function, allowing the user to select only terms which will provide meaningful results.
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