Interactivity is defined by Henri (1992) as a three-step process involving communication of information, a response to this information, and a reply to that first response. It is a key dimension of computer-mediated communication, particularly in the one-on-one communication involved in an electronic mentoring program. This report analyzes the interactivity between pairs of corporate research scientists (mentors) and university biology students (protégés) during two consecutive implementations of an electronic mentoring program. The frequency and structure of the interactions within each pair were examined to provide context: 542 messages were posted among the 20 mentors and 20 protégés. These messages were formed into 5-10 threads per pair, with 3-4 messages per thread, indicating a high level of interactivity (there were more responses posted than independent messages). Mentor-protégé pairs rated as effective by both mentors and protégés' posted more messages overall, had well-structured threads, had protégés and mentor postings that were similar in topic coverage and message length, and had little overt "management" behavior by mentors. However, there appears to be no clear recipe for successful interaction. Not only are there a variety of factors at play in developing an online relationship in this context, but mentor-protégés pairs can falter at various stages in the process and in various ways.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. (1991) Requirements analysis for hypertext applications: the why, what and how approach. Applied Ergonomics, 22(4), 458-462. Abstract: The present paper presents a simple task description procedure for text usage aimed at supporting human factors input to the specification stage of hypertext and electronic document design. The need for such techniques is outlined and the approach is described in the context of designing hypertext versions of software manuals. Applications and limitations of this procedure are discussed.

In an increasingly complex world where people routinely handle large amounts of information, individuals are constantly challenged to manage and effectively use the information that they are responsible for. While email is the canonical example of an information overloading application, other well known PIM applications and tasks cited in earlier chapters of this book include maintaining addresses and contacts, scheduling, and organizing the various documents and bookmarks that one is interested in. Not surprisingly, there are individual differences (ID) in how, and how well, people cope with the challenge of personal information management. This greatly complicates any scientific analysis of PIM behavior. Thus, in addition to the evaluation methods discussed in the previous chapter, researchers and designers need to consider when and how individual differences should be included within parsimonious interpretations and explanations of PIM behavior. In this chapter we propose an approach where differences between individuals are considered last, after the influences of the environment and the task context have first been considered, and after group difference (e.g., between job classifications) have been investigated. We believe that this is a logical way to proceed, since like observing an ant walking over sand-dunes (cf. Simon, 1996) we should not ascribe complexities to an individual if they can instead be explained as due to properties of the environment. The goal of this chapter will be to review and synthesize some of the key findings in how PIM behavior differs between individuals. Some of the reasons why these differences occur and what can be done about them will also be discussed.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Illinois DLI Project, one of six projects funded by the NSF/DARPA/NASA DLI, consists of two major components: (1) a production testbed based in a real library (SGML publisher stream deployed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UIUC) and (2) fundamental technology research for semantic interoperability (semantic indexes across subjects and media developed at the University of Arizona). The Illinois DLI production testbed was developed in the Grainger Engineering library at UIUC. It supports full SGML federated structure search on an experimental Web-based interface. The initial rollout was available at the UIUC campus in October 1997 and has been integrated with the library information services. The testbed consist of materials from 5 publishers, 55 engineering journals, and 40,000 full-text articles. The testbed was implemented using SoftQuad (SGML rendering) and OpenText (full-text search), both commercial software.

This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM 2006"

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. (1995) Artifacts as Theories: Convergence through User- Centered Design. 1995 Proceedings of the 58th Annual ASIS Conference, Medford NJ: ASIS, 208-210. Abstract: The present paper proposes the artifact as theory perspective which draws together models of scientific practice and design behaviour and in so doing, offers the view of any information technology system as a conjecture on the part of the design team of human and organizational requirements to be met. By adopting this perspective, information system design can be seen as an ill-structured problem best tackled by usercentered theories and methods. The present paper will outline this perspective, emphasizing the need for convergence of views at the outset of design, and demonstrate the advantages it offers to both the theory and practice of technology design and the field of information science.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / As in many other applications, the rapid proliferation and unrestricted Web-based publishing of health-related content have made finding pertinent and useful healthcare information increasingly difficult. Although the development of healthcare information retrieval systems such as medical search engines and peer-reviewed medical Web directories has helped alleviate this information and cognitive overload problem, the effectiveness of these systems has been limited by low search precision, poor presentation of search results, and the required user search effort. To address these challenges, we have developed a domain-specific meta-search tool called Cancer Spider. By leveraging post-retrieval document clustering techniques, this system aids users in querying multiple medical data sources to gain an overview of the retrieved documents and locating answers of high quality to a wide spectrum of health questions. The system presents the retrieved documents to users in two different views: (1) Web pages organized by a list of key phrases, and (2) Web pages clustered into regions discussing different topics on a two-dimensional map (self-organizing map). In this paper, we present the major components of the Cancer Spider system and a user evaluation study designed to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Initial results comparing Cancer Spider with NLM Gateway, a premium medical search site, have shown that they achieved comparable performances measured by precision, recall, and F-measure. Cancer Spider required less user searching time, fewer documents that need to be browsed, and less user effort.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following this material: Dillon, A. and Song M. (1997) An empirical novice and expert searchers of a textual and a graphic database, Journal of Digital Information, 1(1). Abstract: The present paper reports an experimental test of a prototype graphic and textual search interface for a university database on art-resource works. Novice and expert searchers were tested on both interfaces with performance assessed in terms of search speed and accuracy. Verbal protocols and navigation strategies were also examined. Experts performed significantly faster than novices though both user groups performed slightly (but not significantly) faster with the graphical interface. Furthermore, the graphical interface significantly reduced navigation effort. While there were no significant task accuracy differences, novices failed to complete more searches with the textual interface. Implications of these results for search interfaces to digital resources are briefly discussed.

The fields of HCI and MIS share many concerns but have traditionally not shared literatures, theories and results. This special issue is a first attempt at bridging the disciplinary divide. In this paper, the history of both fields is briefly outlined and reasons for the independence of eachare examined. The criteria for paper inclusion are outlined and each paper is briefly introduced.

A number of references in the Human-Computer Interaction literature make the common-sense suggestion that the animated zooming effect accompanying the opening or closing of a folder in the Apple Macintosh graphical user interface aids in a user's perception of which window corresponds to which folder. We examine this claim empirically using two controlled experiments. Although we did not find a statistically significant overall difference resulting from the presence or absence of the zooming effect, a post hoc analysis revealed a highly significant interaction between the experience of users with the Macintosh user interface and the zooming effect. This individual difference suggests that users become attuned to the informational content of the zooming effect with experience.