Paper Reading #24, "Outline Wizard"

http://zmhenkel-chi2010.blogspot.com/2011/03/paper-reading-16-performance.html
http://ryankerbow.blogspot.com/2011/04/paper-reading-23.html

Outline Wizard: Presentation Composition and Search

Lawrence Bergman, Jie Lu, Ravi Konuru, Julie MacNaught, Danny Yeh

IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

IUI’10, February 7–10, 2010, Hong Kong, China




Summary
Outline Wizard is a power point plug-in designed to provide hierarchical structure to presentations of existing material. It is built to fill a need the authors perceive in that all current presentation software treats presentations simply as linear collections of slides. The intended benefits are improving both the effectiveness and ease of use of structure, of searching, and of incorporating results into the presentation. Additional features include an algorithm to scan a presentation an extract an outline, and searching based on the outline (either derived or provided) to more easily find content in extant presentations.

Tests indicated that both algorithms were effective, and a user study of the software met with "enthusiastic" results. Five of the six participants believed that the software would be of significant benefit, relative to existing methods; the last was undecided. The most immediate point of further proposed work would be to expand the search algorithm to returns sets of slides than slide as single units.

The user interface, from the paper.

Discussion
This paper was the best written and most accessible of the IUI papers I have been assigned. I hadn't thought of this type of thing beforehand, but it seems like a structure for presentations would be both interesting and useful to have. The biggest flaw in the paper was the small sample size of the user study. Six people really isn't very many. In the future, I would like to see this software tested on a much larger scale and see if the users are as pleased over a long term as the short term.