contributed;articles

Doi: 10.1145/2018396.2018414

Users will speak rather than type,
watch video rather than read, and use
technology socially rather than alone.
By maRti a. heaRst
‘Natural’
search user
interfaces

WhAt DoeS the future hold for search interfaces for users? Today’s familiar Web search interface works well for tens of millions of people and billions of queries a year, but few innovations in search interfaces gain wide-enough acceptance to replace the standard type-keywords-in-entry-form/view-results-in-a-vertical-results-list interface. This is partly because search is a means toward another end, and reading text is a mentally demanding task. The fewer distractions while reading, the more usable the interface. Additionally, search, like email, is used by nearly everyone using the Web, so its features and functions must be understandable to an enormous and diverse population. 13

Future trends in search interfaces will most likely reflect trends in the use of IT generally. Today, there is a notable trend toward more “natural” user interfaces: pointing with fingers rather than mice, speaking rather than typing, viewing videos rather than reading text, and writing full sentences rather than artificial

keywords. (The term “natural interface” is promoted by researchers at Microsoft, among others.) Not surprisingly, people are drawn to interfaces that allow them to think and move in a manner like what they use in their non-computing lives, but only recently has technology been able to support it.

There is also a trend toward social rather than solo use of IT, with these multi-person interactions often recorded, stored, and indexed for later viewing. Again, many people would have preferred non-isolated computer use from the start, but technology and user-interface design did not support it well until recently.

Technology is advancing toward integration of massive quantities of user behavior and large-scale human-generated knowledge bases. Search today benefits from the tracking of search behavior over hundreds of millions of queries to improve ranking, offer accurate spelling suggestions, auto-suggest query terms in real time as the user types, and suggest concepts related to a query. Integration with databases and more sophisticated processing place search at the cusp of being able to support smarter, data-driven, focused interfaces for advanced search.

These trends are, or will be, interweaving in various ways, with interesting ramifications for search interfaces

 

key insights

;;; “Natural” modes of interaction are starting to be commonplace in hardware and soft ware tools, influencing search interfaces in interesting ways.

;;; these changes lend urgency to the research problems of analyzing video content, interpreting spoken and written natural language, and supporting collaboration among people seeking information together.

;;; content analysis over huge collections of user behavior data, combined with interactive user-interface design could lead to breakthroughs in such long-standing problems as human-computer dialogues for question answering.