Agileviews: A Human-Centered Framework for Interfaces to Information Spaces
Gary Marchionini
INLS 357

Information Perspective
Search is embedded in real life tasks
Search is both analytical and interactive
People and needs are diverse
Vision is both a primary channel and a metaphor

Design Provenance
Direct Manipulation (Shneiderman, 1983)
Visible objects and actions
Rapid, reversible, incremental actions
Dynamic queries
Xerox alto, Apple Lisa, Macintosh & GUIS  & WIMP interfaces (1979+)
Hypertext (Bush, 1945; Nelson, 1974)
Links are first class objects
Games and visualizations (lunar lander 1960s, Atari Pong, 1972); VR (Engelbart--radar; Sutherland—simulations)
See http://www.designboom.com/eng/education/pong.html for history of games

Views
A view is a partition of an information space
There are many possible partitions for any space since many attributes may be used to ‘slice and dice’ the space
People should be able to effortlessly change views
Focus can change based on granularity
Focus can change based on attribute

Agile Views Framework

Theory to Practice
Design challenge 1: creating views
What granularities (collections and items)
Which attribute sets?
Creating or extracting metadata
Design challenge 2: manipulating/controlling views
Perceptual estimation (e.g., look ahead)
Physical and conceptual inertia

Three Examples
Relation Browser
Federal statistics, overviews of relationships (several different partitions).  Useful for small number of attribute sets, each with small number of attribute values.  Backend database of metadata, Java applet interface (Ben Brunk, Junliang Zhang)
Enriched Links
Complex web sites, previews, overviews, and reviews of pages.  Backend computation and Javascript interface (Gary Geisler)
Integrated overviews and previews
Multimedia digital library, backend computation, Java applet interface (Wei Ding, Gary Geisler)

Relation Browser (2000)

Relation Browser+ 2003

Enriched Links:Preview

Enriched Links: Overview

Enriched Links: Shared View

Overviews and Previews: One Screen

Open Video Agile Views
Overviews
Collections, Indexes
Collages?
Previews
Keyframes, Storyboards, fast forwards, clips
Key segments?
Review/History
Back, browser favorites
Explicit recommendations
Shared views
Implicit recommendations
Contributions

Overview: Open Video

One of many previews: Open Video

Give People Flexibility!
Multiple views require rich and accessible metadata
Control mechanisms are kludges in today’s WWW environment
A click is a terrible thing to waste!