Designing Multistage Search Systems to Support the Information Seeking Process

Due to the advances in information retrieval in the past decades, search engines have become extremely efficient at acquiring useful sources in response to a user’s query. However, for more prolonged and complex information seeking tasks, these search engines are not as well suited. During complex information seeking tasks, various stages may occur, which imply varying support needs for users. However, the implications of theoretical information seeking models for concrete search user interfaces (SUI) design are unclear, both at the level of the individual features and of the whole interface. Guidelines and design patterns for concrete SUIs, on the other hand, provide recommendations for feature design, but these are separated from their role in the information seeking process. This chapter addresses the question of how to design SUIs with enhanced support for the macro-level process, first by reviewing previous research. Subsequently, we outline a framework for complex task support, which explicitly connects the temporal development of complex tasks with different levels of support by SUI features. This is followed by a discussion of concrete system examples which include elements of the three dimensions of our framework in an exploratory search and sensemaking context. Moreover, we discuss the connection of navigation with the search-oriented framework. In our final discussion and conclusion, we provide recommendations for designing more holistic SUIs which potentially evolve along with a user’s information seeking process.