Derivation of interface features for user-centric information retrieval systems.

Abstract

As information resources become widely accessible, it becomes crucial that users’ needs are investigated to design user-centred information retrieval (IR) interfaces that help users identify appropriate documents. Yet, most IR systems retrieve relevant documents by matching queries to documents. This system-oriented measure of relevance does not meet users’ view of relevance where documents are assessed by subjective relevance based on how useful documents are for addressing users’ individual tasks.

It is, therefore, important to bridge objective relevance with subjective relevance to create user-centric systems that help users make judgements of relevant documents for their tasks. This investigation combines concepts related to subjective relevance and information-seeking to derive design features that enhance IR interfaces by proposing clusters of important features to guide the design of user-centred interfaces to help users evaluate relevant documents during their search and retrieval process.