(Submitted for Review. More information will appear here if the course is accepted.)

Instructors:

• Marti Hearst, UC Berkeley
• Preston Smalley, eBay

Benefit:

The information architecture community has begun to embrace the use of faceted hierarchical metadata for navigation and search over information collections (museum images, product catalogs, digital libraries). Attendees will learn the advantages of and strategies for using faceted metadata for integrated browsing and search of large information collections. Examples will be drawn both from formal studies and from results of real-world application, with an emphasis on interface design issues.

Origins:

This course was taught at CHI 2006. An early version of this course was taught by Hearst at SIGIR'01-02.

Features:

This course will include:

• Detailed pros and cons of faceted navigation and search
• Design guidelines for faceted search interfaces
• Usability study results
• Case studies
• An in-class exercise

Intended Audience:

The intended audience is usability professionals, especially information architects, but will be of interest to search interface researchers as well.

Presentation Style:

Instruction will consist of lectures, case studies, and in-class discussion.

Instructors' Background:

Marti Hearst an is Associate Professor at the School of Information, UC Berkeley, where she teaches user interface design, information visualization, information retrieval, and related topics. She has helped design and evaluate 10 different search user interfaces, and she initiated and led the Flamenco project that studies how to incorporate hierarchical faceted metadata into information architecture for search and browsing. She has also written a major textbook chapter on search user interfaces.

Hearst has extensive teaching experience, having taught t User Interface Design and Development (eight times), Information Visualization and Presentation, Information Organization and Retrieval, Applied Natural Language Processing, and Foundations of Software Design. She has won two Excellence in Teaching awards from the iSchool students.

Preston Smalley is Lead UI Designer at eBay Inc, User Experience and Design, where he helps drive user experience changes to search products, the latest of which includes multi-faceted browsing, matching buyer and seller language, and multiple selection of concepts. He has a BS in Computer Engineering from Cal Poly.