Adaptation of a Search User Interface towards User Needs

Abstract

Search user interfaces (SUIs) are usually designed and optimized for generic users or for a certain user group. Users within the group are similar, e.g. concerning their information need, search goals or cognitive skills. These properties influence decisions made in the user interface (UI) design process. However, especially for young and elderly users, design requirements change relatively fast due to changes in users' abilities, so a flexible modification of the SUI is needed. In order to overcome this issue, we suggest to develop an evolving search user interface (ESUI). It adapts the UI dynamically based on the derived capabilities of the user interacting with it. In this paper, we present a first prototypical implementation of this idea: A search user interface which takes the special requirements of children into account and is customizable towards their abilities. We offer adaptation in menu type and structure, search result visualization, surrogate structure, font, audio, theme and other SUI properties. This SUI was evaluated in a user study with 27 children and 17 adults. We present the results of the study and discuss implications for further research towards an ESUI.

Search result visualization with characters for children

“…Another SUI is the Knowledge Journey (KJ) [13,14] that was designed for primary school children. It supports children in different ways, providing emotional, language, cognitive, memory and interaction support.…”

“…Our index contained 311 web documents 7 selected from webpages for children to assure a high quality of search results. In comparison, other research used 60 web documents for children [13], the Bing Search API [14] with general web documents or no information was provided about the backend (e.g. [9]).…”

Encountering the world with voice search: A young immigrant and emergent bilingual child’s digital literacies

“…Previous studies on voice search (with a variation of voice assistants, voice-controlled search, and speech recognition) technology have mainly focused on users' responses, language development, and sound perception through technological functions (e.g. Gossen et al, 2013;Yu and Deng, 2016). While young children, language learners, and others who are in the process of developing foundational literacy skills (Barnard et al, 2010) often use the function in their everyday lives (Festerling and Siraj, 2020;Jo et al, 2020), research on how immigrant and emergent bilingual children, who are often labeled as deficient learners, and their families engage with voice search, as well…”