unity-design team mailing list archive

[Roberto Guido <bob4job@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2010-12-20 at 09:33 +0000, femorandeira wrote:
>  An interesting paper on this is "Improved search engines and
>  navigation preference in personal information management", by Bergman
>  et al. (2008).
> 
I get a look to the paper, and in my opinion it demostrates nothing.
It is based exclusively on "personal preferences" of people asked to try
a desktop search engine, and it is not required yet another scientific
paper to explain people are hard to move from their habits (in this
case: browse the filesystem instead search contents).
Self-evaluated "computer experience" of partecipants if between 3.54 and
4.30 on a 1-5 scale (cfr. paragraph 4.1): given that people use to
over-evaluate their capabilities, it is a quite high value and suggests
they were far enough "contaminated" by the addiction of file browsing.

>  Now, this is just an experiment and I am not trying to defend the
>  current state of things, but I would like to see some evidence before
>  jumping on the wagon :-)
> 
A more significative test would get a more variegated set of
partecipants (including people with absolutely no computer literacy, and
a more accurate evaluation about their true competences), and would
consists in a monitored ambient where efficiency is measured. Providing
ad-hoc browse-only and search-only interfaces, using partecipants' own
files (or a set of files they are trained for), and timing retrieval
operations.

-- 
Roberto -MadBob- Guido
http://claimid.com/madbob