AgileViews

AgileViews is a framework for designing interfaces for information seeking. This framework is based on the idea that we can improve information seeking by providing users with agile control over information spaces through the use of alternative views and simple mechanisms for coordinating these views. By explicitly defining and coordinating overviews, previews, peripheral, and shared views, in addition to content-specific views, we hope to produce interfaces that enable users with diverse backgrounds and information needs to effectively find the information they need.

While information seeking often entails some degree of trial and error, the Web clearly exemplifies the need for interfaces that can reduce the time and cognitive effort people expend finding information. An early implementation of the AgileViews idea, a system called Enriched Links, did this by providing people with information—presented in small pop-up visualizations, or agile views—about associated resources represented by hyperlinks. Users activate the agile views simply by moving the mouse over a hyperlink, which causes a pop-up window to appear next to the link (shown to the right). The pop-up window provides immediate, intuitive access to several types of views, such as a thumbnail preview of the linked page; information about the page's title, filesize, and last update; and its access history. By examining one or more views, users can quickly evaluate the potential relevance of a linked resource to their particular information seeking need before the user spends the time and cognitive effort of navigating to the resource and waiting for it to load.

The use of the multiple views easily accessed is modeled on basic characteristics of human information processing and the way humans intuitively use views in the physical world. Just as in the real world people quickly and smoothly change their focus from a distant to a close-up to a peripheral view, we believe that in the digital world people should be able to focus on the view that provides the type of information most appropriate for their unique context and information seeking needs. We are currently working on an interface for video browsing based on the AgileViews framework. The example below shows how a user can browse an overview of a video collection and easily focus on the aspect of the collection that is of most interest. Here the user is browsing the overview by genre, but the overview can be browsed by characteristics such as color and sounds as well.

More Information

• Geisler, Gary (2003). AgileViews: A Framework for Creating More Effective Information Seeking Interfaces. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. [21MB download]
• Geisler, Gary, Marchionini, Gary, Nelson, Michael, Spinks, Richard and Yang, Meng (2001). "Interface Concepts for the Open Video Project." Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science, November, 2001, 58-75.
• Geisler, Gary, and Gary Marchionini (2000). "Enriched Links: Supporting AgileViews for Diverse User Needs." Unpublished paper.
• Marchionini, Gary, Geisler, Gary, and Brunk, Ben (2000). "AgileViews: A Human-Centered Framework for Interfaces to Information Spaces." Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Society for Information Science, November, 2000, 271-280.
• Geisler, Gary (2000). "Enriched Links: A Framework For Improving Web Navigation Using Pop-Up Views." SILS Technical Report TR-2000-02.