Last week I had the privilege of attending HCIR 08 on Microsoft’s Research campus. HCIR, in it’s second year, was graciously hosted by Microsoft providing some excellent food, great keynote speaker, and some excellent demonstrations during lunch.
A common question that was asked of me is why was I there. I’m not a PhD student, a researcher, or a presenter. I was there to get a feeling of what is going on in the research and academic community to address search issues, especially related to enterprise search.
Common themes that I heard throughout were:
- Today’s search has been limited to a single text box. That doesn’t address hard search problems.
- Faceted search is a common approach to addressing search problems.
- Users want easy to use, yet powerful search tools.
At the end of the day, the participants broke out into four discussion groups: interactivity, task / workflow integration, sharing/collaboration, and results presentation. I participated in the interactivity group. The highlights of these breakout groups will be published soon.
Finally, a discussion on the best way to keep the HCIR community alive on-line was discussed. Ideas from wiki’s to forums to blogs to twitter were thrown out. All good methods of communication, but no consensus for the group.
Overall, it was a great workshop and looking forward to HCIR 09 on the east coast.