The Great BayCHI'97 Browse-Off
Kevin Mullet, Netscape; Diane Schiano & Karen Theisen, Interval Research; Ramana Rao, InXight Software; Peter Pirolli, Xerox PARC; Eugene Jhong, Stanford University; and several volunteers

The Great CHI'97 Browse-Off provided attendees of CHI'97 in Atlanta with an opportunity to see six leading structure visualization and browsing technologies for an entertaining yet informative "live" comparison. Users of each system competed "head-to-head" in a series of races designed to simulate the stressful conditions under which real world browsing often takes place. Expert and (for two systems) novice operators used the visualization and browsing tools to complete a set of generic retrieval tasks as quickly and accurately as possible within a large hierarchical data set. Attendees were able to see for themselves which techniques worked well or poorly for various classes of retrieval problems.

Every entry had something special to offer (two heroic contestants using only a DOS command-line shell became an instant audience favorite by staying close to the leaders through the first two rounds), but the top performance was turned in by Ramana Rao using the Hyperbolic Tree (tm) technology from InXight. The Hyperbolic Tree proved itself to be extremely responsive, graphically efficient, and devastatingly effective in the hands of a skilled operator using novel techniques like "fanning" the data in a focus-plus-context display. For the August BayCHI meeting we've asked InXight to "defend their title" in a rematch against the standard Windows Explorer from Microsoft, which finished in a tie for second place at CHI'97. (A third, surprise competitor is a possibility.)

The BayCHI session will follow the same format used in Atlanta, with similar (but new) retrieval tasks and the original data set. Attendees will see a series of "races" pitting the Hyperbolic Tree browser and Windows Explorer (and a third competitor?) against one another in the hands of both expert operators and rank novice "volunteers" selected from the audience. The competition will be preceded by a short review of the background and motivation for the browse-off format, some design considerations in the creation of the rules, data set, and retrieval tasks, and a summary of the final results from Atlanta. The races will be followed by a round table discussion during which the participants will field questions from the audience on strategies, techniques, and the distinctions (if any) between searching, browsing, and querying.

Kevin Mullet is a Managing Principal Consultant in the Information Architecture and Design practice of Netscape's Professional Services organization. His group works with large corporate clients to design and implement web-based solutions in HTML, JavaScript, and Java for deployment on intranets, extranets, and public internet sites. He was previously at Macromedia, where he led the design of Director 5 and 6 along with a cross-product design initiative (the Macromedia User Interface) that helps users move easily between Director, Authorware, Flash, FreeHand, Fontographer, Xres, and SoundEdit. Before joining Macromedia, he spent four years at Sun, where he worked on the OPEN LOOK GUI and various productivity and multimedia applications in Sun Microsystems, advanced desktop environments in SunSoft, and object-oriented development tools in SunPro. He is co-author of the book Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques, from Prentice-Hall.

Diane Schiano is a Member of Research Staff at Interval Research Corporation, where she leads a project aimed at applying a deep understanding of perceptual and cognitive psychology towards informing the design of computer-human interactions. Her research interests center largely around issues in visual-spatial cognition, including navigation and visualization. She received her doctorate in experimental psychology from Princeton and held positions at Stanford, Oberlin College, NASA/Ames Research Center and Sun Microsystems prior to coming to Interval.

Ramana Rao is director of engineering and chief technology officer of InXight Software, the Xerox company that is commercializing Xerox's information visualization and natural language research. In 96, he lead the effort to form Xerox's business plans for information visualization, which contributed to the founding of InXight in 97. At Xerox PARC, Ramana published research in a variety of areas including information access, information visualization, paper user interfaces, document imaging, object-oriented programming, reflection, and window systems. Ramana received his degrees in computer science from MIT.

Peter Pirolli is a cognitive scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. He received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. As an Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley he did research on computational cognitive models of learning to program, intelligent tutoring systems, models of generic design problem solving, and learning-to-learn strategies. His current interests include ecological and cognitive theories for understanding and designing complex information environments, theories of measurement of knowledge content, access, and learning, and the development of new empirical methods for the study of information work.