User Interface Design in a Just-in-time Retrieval System for Meetings

The Automatic Content Linking Device (ACLD) is a just-in-time multimedia retrieval system that monitors and supports the conversation among a small group of people within a meeting. The ACLD retrieves from a repository, at regular intervals, information that might be relevant to the group's activity, and presents it through a graphical user interface (GUI). The repository contains documents from past meetings such as slides or reports along with processed meeting recordings; in parallel, Web searches are run as well. The acceptance by users of such a system depends considerably on the GUI, along with the performance of retrieval. The trade-off between informativeness and unobtrusiveness is studied here through the design of a series of GUIs. The requirements and feedback collected while demonstrating the successive versions show that users vary considerably in their preferences for a given style of interface. After studying two extreme options, a widget vs. a wide-screen UI, we conclude that a modular UI, which can be flexibly structured and resized by users, is the most sensible design for a just-in-time multimedia retrieval system.