Made to Measure:

A CHIIR 2023 Workshop on Human-centred Metrics for Information Seeking

March 19th, 2023 Austin, Texas

This workshop is now running online as part of CHIIR 2023, following a previous workshop at CHIIR in 2021.

Search engines are predominantly made to measure: The key axis of development in over 40 years of information retrieval research has been improvements in precision, recall, click rates and other technical measures of their performance. Taking both human and software as two parts of an interactive system, we need to understand humans and their needs as a vital part of the whole. In research, software measurements have been extensively researched. Human effort, experience and behaviour are all vital elements of interactive information work that would similarly benefit from metrication and measurement.

This workshop aims to understand and diversify what can be measured, and discuss how the measuring might result in real improvements to information interfaces for the human beings that use them. We are interested in search, browsing, serendipity, collection overview, synthesis and any other information work that involves humans working with computers. We are interested in receiving contributions on:

· Metrics that focus on the human effort, experience, and interactions in information seeking. Rather than merely measuring system outputs

· Metrics for non-search forms of information seeking or experience. Any metrics focusing on browsing, creativity, serendipity or other forms of information experience

· Benchmarks for information seeking experience taken from non-digital environments. Measures of successful behaviours in non digital environments that might inform better development of human centric systems

· Any other measures that might advance a human-centric approach to information interaction