For a quarter century we have been inundated by prognostications about the information society and changes in the world's economies and cultures. With apologies to Samuel Clemens, I believe that reports of the demise of society and culture have been greatly exaggerated. I do believe, however, that information technologies (computers and communication networks) are bringing about qualitative changes in how we learn and work. In particular, our abilities and capabilities to seek and use information are strongly influenced by these environments. This book aims to explicate some of these changes so that information workers can better prepare for the ongoing changes ahead and system designers can better understand the needs and perspectives of information seekers.

As a teacher, I have always been troubled by students' confusion about memory and learning. Memory is necessary but not sufficient for learning and understanding, and this confusion reflects larger distinctions among information, knowledge, and wisdom. It is this concern that has led me to consider information seeking as a broader process rather than the more limited notion of information retrieval. The book presents a framework for understanding information seeking and applies the framework to an analysis of search strategies and how they have been affected by electronic technology. Based on 10 years of user studies, this book describes how formal, analytical search strategies have been made more powerful by technology and argues for systems that also support intuitive browsing strategies.

As more information becomes available in electronic form, more systems are developed to support electronic information seeking, and more people gain experience using such systems, our overall expectations change and evolve about the value of information and the roles it plays in our lives. In the previous chapters we considered how technical developments have led to complex and rapidly changing electronic environments. These developments include

• Hardware advances in storage, processing, display, and networking.

• Integration of application software such as text management, database management, communications, and hypermedia.

• Retrieval algorithms and techniques such as inverted indexes, vector representations, and clustering.

• Human–computer interface developments such as user-centered design, direct manipulation, and graphical user interfaces.

These electronic environments have influenced information-seeking by amplifying what is possible in manual environments and requiring new information-seeking strategies. In this chapter, we summarize how electronic environments have already changed information seeking and examine some of the constraining conditions that moderate these continuing changes.

Effects of electronic environments

To examine how information seeking is affected by electronic environments, we should distinguish between the physical and intellectual consequences of information in electronic form. This distinction must be qualified as one of convenience, because physical and intellectual changes are interrelated. Physical changes include greater volumes of information, remote access (allows users to transcend space), transfer speed (allows users to minimize time requirements), multiple formats and flexible management of those formats, behavioral actions of users, and capital investments.

Information seeking involves a number of personal and environmental factors and processes. In this chapter we identify these factors and processes and see how they work together to define and constrain information seeking. Before reading further, stop and consider the many information-seeking activities you perform each day. Suppose you have a well-defined information need such as finding a phone number for a business in a foreign city. What do you need to know to begin? What things do you already know about telephones, businesses, and information seeking that will help in your search? What sources could help? How can you determine whether they are available? How do you use them? What are the costs in time or money? How will you know when you have found the correct number? What kinds of questions can you imagine for a more openended but better-focused information problem such as understanding the implications of the European Common Market's trade agreement with Japan on what investments to make for a child's college trust fund? How would your strategies differ for a fuzzy problem like gaining information to improve one's knowledge of a domain of interest? Clearly, we encounter many varieties of information problems and apply varied information-seeking strategies to solve these problems. To understand this variety, it is useful to have a framework that explicates factors and processes common to information seeking in general.

Our world continues to become increasingly complex, interconnected, and dynamic: There are more people and institutions; they engage in more relationships and exchange; and the rates of change continue to grow, largely because of developments in technology and the importance of information to human and technical development. We live in an information society in which more people must manage more information, which in turn requires more technological support, which both demands and creates more information. Electronic technology and information are mutually reinforcing phenomena, and one of the key aspects of living in the information society is the growing level of interactions we have with this complex and increasingly electronic environment. The general consequences of the information society are threefold: larger volumes of information, new forms and aggregations of information, and new tools for working with information.

First, we find ourselves dealing with more information in all aspects of our lives. More of us are “knowledge workers,” generating, managing, and communicating information to produce and provide goods and services for an increasingly global economy. In addition to the often-noted trend toward more people managing more information in the workplace, people must go beyond the workplace to learn new skills and acquire new knowledge to do their jobs.

Evolution proceeds in many waves, some brief by human temporal sensibilities and some lasting for centuries. Some changes in information seeking take place before technological investments are fully amortized (e.g., the latest CPU or software upgrade brings with it access to new information resources), and some take place over careers as strategies and patterns of use learned in school evolve based on new sources and tools. This final chapter examines one long-term change that computing technology brings to cognition in general and to information seeking in particular, considers how different domains interact to influence the evolution of information seeking, and concludes with some ideas about what types of systems we should strive to build.

Amplification and augmentation

Applying computational power to information problems has been a research and design goal from the first days of computing. The dreams of language translation and cybernetic assistants have given way to dreams of artificial realities and intelligent agents, but our fascination with the manipulation of symbolic data and with interactivity remains a driving force behind much of the research in artificial intelligence and engineering. One way to consider how computation may be applied to information problems is to examine how it may be applied to amplify and augment intellect.

Throughout our lives we develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes that allow us to seek and use information. This chapter introduces the notion of personal information infrastructure, which will be used to describe this complex of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. It also introduces the notion of interactivity, a key characteristic of computer technology that allows information seekers to use electronic environments in ways that emulate interactions with human sources of information. The chapter also provides an overview of the technological developments that underlie information seeking in electronic environments.

Personal information infrastructures

The primary activities of scientists, physicians, businesspersons, and other professionals are gathering information from the world, mentally integrating that information with their own knowledge – thus creating new knowledge – and acting on this new knowledge to accomplish their goals. Most often, this knowledge and the consequences of using it are articulated to the external world as information. All humans develop mental structures and skills for conducting such activities according to their individual abilities, experiences, and physical resources. An individual person's collection of abilities, experience, and resources to gather, use, and communicate information are referred to as a personal information infrastructure.

Many specific system features have been shown to invite and support browsing as an information-seeking strategy. We are beginning to acquire a set of techniques that define what is possible in designing such features. Determining what is optimal for different users, tasks, and settings requires systematically testing techniques across the range of information-seeking factors. Because browsing requires users to coordinate physical and mental activities, systems that support browsing must solve both technical and conceptual problems. Technical challenges such as the computational power needed to manipulate huge vector spaces on-the-fly and display problems such as resolution limitations, refresh and scroll rates, window sizes, and juxtapositions are difficult enough in isolation but must be coordinated with other technical problems such as mechanisms for selection and control of information and conceptual problems such as what the best representations of meaning are for specific information items and what should be displayed at what time, in what form, and at what level of granularity. Programs of research are needed that address the technical problems of designing interaction styles for browsing, that determine the physiological and psychological boundaries of browsing activities, and that test various representations for browsable information. These are technical, user, and organizational areas, respectively. Although different researchers and groups typically specialize in one of these problem areas, ultimately the support for browsing will depend on integrating results from all three.

The storage and retrieval of scientific texts were early applications of computers, and by the early 1960s, schemes for automatic indexing and abstracting had emerged (e.g., Doyle, 1965; Luhn, 1957, 1958; O'Connor, 1964; Tasman, 1957). As online systems emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, more databases and new search features were created to give professional intermediaries more power in searching for information. Searching in online systems was complex, and so intermediaries created systematic strategies for eliciting users' needs; selecting terms, synonyms, and morphological variants appropriate to the need and the system; using Boolean operators to formulate precise queries; restricting those queries to specific database fields; forming intermediate sets of results; manipulating those sets; and selecting appropriate display formats. The strategies and tactics that professional intermediaries use are meant to maximize retrieval effectiveness while minimizing online costs. These strategies are goal oriented and systematic and are termed analytical strategies. In this chapter, we describe several analytical strategies to illustrate how electronic environments have changed information seeking by allowing searchers to systematically manipulate large sets of potentially relevant documents. These strategies in turn influenced subsequent designs of online systems. Next we look at studies of novice users working with various online systems, showing how difficult analytical strategies are to learn and apply, and the need for electronic systems that support informal information-seeking strategies for end users.

In contrast with the formal, analytical strategies developed by professional intermediaries, information seekers also use a variety of informal, heuristic strategies. These informal, interactive strategies are clustered together under the term browsing strategies. In general, browsing is an approach to information seeking that is informal and opportunistic and depends heavily on the information environment. Four browsing strategies are distinguished in this chapter: scanning, observing, navigating, and monitoring. The term browsing reflects the general behavior that people exhibit as they seek information by using one of these strategies.

Browsing is a natural and effective approach to many types of information-seeking problems. It is natural because it coordinates human physical, emotive, and cognitive resources in the same way that humans monitor the physical world and search for physical objects. It can be effective because the environment and particularly human-created environments are generally organized and highly redundant – especially information environments that are designed according to organizational principles. Browsing is particularly effective for information problems that are ill defined or interdisciplinary and when the goal of information seeking is to gather overview information about a topic or to keep abreast of developments in a field.

The following concerns are addressed in this concluding chapter:

1. An assessment of the development of MUSE and MUSE*/JSD. For instance, have appropriate case-studies and tests been used to support the development and demonstration of the methods?

2. An assessment of the methodological characteristics of MUSE and MUSE*/JSD. For instance, is their scope of human factors design appropriate? Are requirements identified in Chapters One and Two satisfied by MUSE and MUSE*/JSD, and have they any limitations?

3. A review of potential developments of MUSE and MUSE*/JSD. For instance, how could the methods be enhanced with respect to (a), (b) and (c) above? What computerbased tools could be developed to support the methods; and should declarative human factors knowledge be collated and integrated with them to facilitate method application at each stage of system development?

These concerns are discussed in turn in the sub-sections that follow.

An Overview and Assessment of Method Development Activities of MUSE and MUSE*/JSD

Generally, activities for developing the methods were implemented as planned, e.g. literature surveys; specification and test of method conceptions; case-study selection, planning and familiarisation; etc. An assessment of how key concerns of method development were addressed is discussed below:

1. Case-study selection. It was clear that the number of case-studies undertaken specifically to develop and test the methods would be limited by the resources available. Thus, considerable care was devoted to the planning and selection of appropriate casestudies for developing and testing the methods.

Having developed a structured method that supports human factors specification at each stage of system development (namely MUSE), its explicit integration with similarly structured software engineering methods may be considered. In this way, the problems associated with the ‘too-little-too-late’ contribution of human factors to system development may be addressed more completely (see Chapter One). To this end, the following concerns of methodological integration are discussed in this chapter:

1. (a) A conception of what constitutes an integration of structured human factors and software engineering methods. The requirements to be satisfied by the integrated method are thus defined.

2. (b) The pre-requisites and issues to be addressed during the integration of structured human factors and software engineering methods.

The above concerns are reviewed generally, followed by an illustration of how they have been addressed in the integration of MUSE (the structured human factors method) with the Jackson Systems Development (JSD) method (a structured software engineering method). For completeness and to provide a contrast with the latter work, other integrations of human factors with structured software engineering methods (work undertaken elsewhere) are also reviewed. Three structured software engineering methods are covered in the latter review, namely the Jackson System Development (JSD) method; the Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM); and the Structured Analysis and Structured Design (SASD) Method.

In this chapter, the stages of the Design Synthesis Phase of the method, namely the Statement of User Needs Stage, the Composite Task Model Stage, and the System and User Task Model Stage, will be described in the order by which design is advanced. The account includes the design products derived to support target system specification using the method. Using the format outlined in Chapter Three, design activities of each of the stages are described in terms of sub-processes that transform its inputs into a number of products. As in Chapter Four, case-study examples are used to illustrate the products.

The Statement of User Needs (SUN) Stage

The Statement of User Needs Stage summarizes the conclusions of extant systems analysis and defines user requirements for the target system. Thus, the information collated would include a mixture of the following:

1. (a) existing user needs and problems;

2. (b) existing design requirements, rationale and constraints;

3. (c) rationale underlying extant design features to be ported to the target system;

4. (d) performance criteria and domain semantics for the target system.

The primary purpose of the products derived at this stage is to establish constraints to support later design decisions and extensions, e.g. during the synthesis of task models at the Composite Task Model Stage.

Figure 5-1 shows the location of the Statement of User Needs Stage relative to other stages of the method (the stage is indicated by a box outlined in bold).