Establishing Requirements for Information Gathering Tasks

This PhD project aims at understanding and supporting the complex activities of information gathering. To date, most search applications support one aspect of search namely low-level keyword-based search to find documents. How- ever, in reality, users search tasks are often high-level search tasks, such as com- paring differences between art objects. Thus, there is a mismatch between the users search needs and the available search tools. This research investigates in- formation gathering characteristics and how alternative search interfaces could support them. Design recommendations and guidelines for interfaces to support information gathering will be designed and verified through lab experiments and evaluation in different domains.