Designing User Interfaces for Social Media Driven Digital Preservation and Information Retrieval

Abstract

Social Media provide a vast amount of information identifying stories, events, entities that play the crucial role of shaping the community in an everyday heavy user involvement. This work involves the study of social media information in terms of type (multimodal: text, video, sound, picture) and role players (agents, users, opinion leaders) and the potential of designing accessible, usable interfaces that integrate that information. This case examines the design of a user interface that uses an underlying engine for modality components (plain text, sound, image, video) analysis, social media crawling, contextual search fusion and semantic analysis. The interface is the only point of user interaction to the world of knowledge. This work reports on the usability and accessibility methods and concerns for the user requirements phase and the design control and testing. The findings of the pilot user testing and evaluation provide indications on how the semantic analysis of the social media information can be integrated to the design methodologies for user interfaces resulting in maximization of user experience in terms of social information involvement.