Habitability in search engine interfaces: Characteristics identified through formative evaluation

A shared characteristic of many search engines is that people can formulate queries using terms from natural language to search for information on the web. Habitability describes the degree to which a person can use a language to express an information need that a system can understand and provide useful responses to. The goal of this research was to identify search-engine characteristics that impact habitability.; This study used techniques from formative evaluation to identify interface characteristics. Eight participants with similar internet searching experience were asked to perform eight modified tasks from TREC. The initial search-engine for each task was either Google or Ask Jeeves. Participants were asked to speak aloud as they performed each task, and Camtasia was used to record each session for analysis.; Characteristics of both Google and Jeeves, which included processing queries and presenting results in useful ways, enabled all users to successfully complete most tasks. Results of this study suggest that some characteristics of more habitable interfaces are that they: support users' search strategies; communicate interface capabilities; reduce clutter; support query formulation and result interpretation; provide access to source information; and communicate domain information about source documents to users.