The Internet has changed the way in which people plan recreational travel. Unfortunately, the changes have increased the complexity of the planning task, causing some people to dread planning a vacation because of the time and work involved. The goal of our study is to characterize patterns in the information-seeking behavior of people planning recreational travel. Specifically, we are interested in how the Internet is used in the planning process and what barriers are commonly encountered. We interviewed forty-nine people at two sites in downtown Seattle. Participants were asked about time spent researching and planning a recent vacation, including the types of barriers they encountered, specific websites used, frequency of their Internet usage, and connection type. The data were then analyzed to determine if patterns could be identified.

Adaptive hypermedia systems dynamically change their design and/or architecture in an effort to facilitate the information seeking process for its users. This study takes a look at the two main classes of adaptation techniques, based on visual or architectural reorganization, and compares them in a twenty-participant experimental trial. Within the first class, the study looks at the use of colors to facilitate the information seeking process. Within the second class (architecturally-based adaptations), the study looks at clustering techniques. This study will give insight into which adaptations work most effectively in an information seeking context.

Current research involving the use of personal information management tools have focused on people’s organizational patterns in a very general sense. One important aspect that needs to be addressed is the diversity of people’s lives. Current research does not take under consideration the different situations and environments in which people’s organizational patterns may be different. How one arranges documents in one computer may be dissimilar from how it is arranged in another. The goal of this research is to investigate how people manage electronic information across different computer environments. Through interviews and observations, the organizational patterns of people’s electronic documents, email and bookmarks on two different computer settings will be examined individually and then compared. The results can be used to develop better tools that support stability in the management of personal information across both the information forms and the environments that make up our lives.

Adaptive hypermedia systems dynamically change their design and/or architecture in an effort to facilitate the information seeking process for its users. This study takes a look at the two main classes of adaptation techniques, based on visual or architectural reorganization, and compares them in a twenty-participant experimental trial. Within the first class, the study looks at the use of colors to facilitate the information seeking process. Within the second class (architecturally-based adaptations), the study looks at clustering techniques. This study will give insight into which adaptations work most effectively in an information seeking context.

To secure themselves with emotional support when adjusting to the new environment and to stay prepared for their return in the future, communicating with friends back in the home country is very important to international students. In order to learn if the two specific communication tools, instant messengers and Weblogs, are useful in this role, this study examined the communication behaviors among Asian international students at the University of Washington. The first phase of our research involved an online survey consisting of general communication behavior questions filled out by 90 participants. 4 participants were chosen from this phase for the next phase, a 1-week period of journaling and follow-up interview, which helped us to answer further questions about their friendships and perceptions of the two communication tools. This study will in turn be able to help the students, the schools and telecommunications companies.

Information overload is a well-known problem without a simple solution, but by eliciting more user participation in the query process we can refine a set of search results to a narrower subject and get a smaller, more relevant set of documents. For this study we will assess the mental models users develop of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) semantic types as they use them to refine search results. Selecting the hierarchical semantic types is an unfamiliar task for participants. However, if we understand more about how novice users think about semantic types we will be able to design more intuitive interfaces to help users interact with semantic types. In addition to assessing mental models to gain a better understanding of how to design these interfaces we will also begin to examine the types of visualizations that are most helpful to users browsing the semantic type hierarchy.

Project management software and computer-mediated communication have become increasingly important in the professional world. Software designers in the workplace have benefited from using these technologies for years, but students have not benefited similarly in educational settings. University students often need to communicate and complete projects as a group, a task that can be difficult while juggling different schedules and ideas. Could project management software facilitate group work among university students? In this exploratory study, researchers seek to expand the knowledge about the use of groupware with university students. We survey students using a questionnaire for their opinions about previous experiences in group work and follow a small sample of case studies using project management software. We gather data from online questionnaires and an interview with the case studies. Our interest lies in whether the case studies seem more satisfied and feel their work in groups is more efficient than the general university population.