Our goal is to find common elements for understanding the next generation of search interfaces to support exploration. The workshop will run for one full-day, and offer an interdisciplinary forum of discussion for researchers, practitioners, and academics interested in designing and evaluating technology for supporting exploratory search activities. It will span research fields like interactive design, HCI, computer science, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and information science. The workshop will facilitate discussions aiming at the development of a set of guidelines for designing systems to support exploratory search activities. The workshop will address the following questions, under two topic headings, interaction and evaluation:

Interaction

• What are the important features of an interface to support exploratory search?
• What visualization/organization features should such interfaces provide?
• What about interfaces to support exploratory search activities that extend beyond the desktop (e.g., in mobile environments)?
• What skills and experience in the CHI community can we draw upon to help us develop these interfaces?
• What are the challenges surrounding searchers’ adoption of new search interfaces in opendomains such as the World Wide Web?

Evaluation

• How is evaluating exploratory search interfaces different from evaluating other highly interactive applications?
• What methodologies are most appropriate to evaluate these interfaces? What are the key components of an exploratory search evaluation?
• How do we evaluate rates of learning, discovery, accretion, and the quality of planning, analysis, and decision-making, within the context of exploratory search?
• Is there a mechanism for comparing interfaces created at multiple sites? Would an initiative such as the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) work for exploratory search interfaces?