A New Framework for Theory-Based Interaction Design Applied to Serendipitous Information Retrieval

The activities of opportunistic and involuntary browsing offer the potential for many of a user's latent problems to be resolved serendipitously, with negligible cognitive effort. In this article, we demonstrate how the design of two novel artifacts to support such behavior was based on a set of Design Actions which were derived from a model of browsing behavior in combination with a cognitive model of human visual information processing. We propose the concept of Design Actions as a way of avoiding the need for an interaction designer associated with these and similar artifacts to understand the cognitive theories underlying them.