Human brain structures and organizes the information received in order to retrieve information easily at another point in time. Information Retrieval, perhaps one of the oldest disciplines in Information Technology and Science, was most likely first defined by Mooers (1950):

“Information retrieval is the name of the process or method whereby a prospect user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in storage containing information useful to him.”

One of the main goals of information retrieval is to promote easier access and facilitate search abilities of the information stored within a system. Initially, researchers mainly investigated laboratory framework, also known as system-oriented research (Jarvelin, 2007). In system-oriented research, the main metrics of measurements are precision and recall of the systems. In other words, the user never initiates retrieving information.

ID for Devz – Jan 2011

Continuing with our ID for Devz series at Hacker Dojo, this time,  Jon Hull,  David Snyder, and I mainly talked about User Research and User Behavior.

For my part, I covered ‘Informal Guerilla User Study; a quick and easy way to get useful user feedback on your app’. We had many enthusiastic devz show up, eagerly wanting to learn more about their users…