A framework for interface design that provides people with flexible control over different views for an information space is presented. The agileviews framework defines overviews, previews, reviews, peripheral views, and shared views that help people make decisions about where they should focus attention during information seeking. In addition to the views themselves, control mechanisms that facilitate low-effort actions and strategies for coordinating the views are discussed. Agileviews are particularly useful when specific partitions of large information spaces such as the WWW have been identified. Examples of these views are provided from several different projects and suggestions for additional research and development are made. Introduction As information becomes increasingly pervasive in wider aspects of human endeavor, the search for information becomes correspondingly more important and complex. Information search is a type of problem solving that requires representation, inf...

The data systems, policies and procedures, corporate culture, and public face of an agency or institution make up its organizational interface. This case study describes how user interfaces for the Bureau of Labor Statistics web site evolved over a 5-year period along with the larger organizational interface and how this co-evolution has influenced the institution itself. Interviews with BLS staff and transaction log analysis are the foci in this analysis that also included user informationseeking studies and user interface prototyping and testing. The results are organized into a model of organizational interface change and related to the information life cycle.

This chapter describes the design, development and testing of one component of a system for creating generally applicable, data-driven sitemap tools and information retrieval applications. This category of software tools are used to enhance information seeking on the web. Such tools are set up by web site administrators who want to provide visitors with alternative browsing and navigation aids. The Generalized Relation Browser, or GRB, illustrates the look-ahead strategy for web navigation within the Agileviews framework. Agileviews define control mechanisms and interfaces for overviews, previews, reviews, peripheral views, and shared views intended to help people make better decisions while seeking information on the Internet. Within this framework, the overall goal of the GRB is to help users to gain a better understanding of collections of online resources by providing them with a kind of sitemap. The GRB is the follow-on to the Federal Statistics Relation Browser prototype, which focused on the US Government Fedstats collection of web sites, providing users a more dynamic and informative browsing alternative to the static sitemap.