A scrollbar-based visualization for document navigation

Abstract

We are interested in questions of improving user control in bestmatch text-retrieval systems, specifically questions as to whether simple visualizations that nonetheless go beyond the minimal ones generally available can significantly help users. Recently, we have been investigating ways to help users decide-given a set of documents retrieved by a query-which documents and passages are worth closer examination.We built a document viewer incorporating a visualization centered around a novel content-displaying scrollbar and color term highlighting, and studied whether the visualization is helpful to non-expert searchers. Participants' reaction to the visualization was very positive, while the objective results were inconclusive.

Hear It Is: Enhancing Rapid Document Browsing with Sound Cues

“…One such example is the enhanced scrollbar technique suggested by Byrd [4]. This used a visual cue -coloured indicators on the scrollbar -to indicate the presence of words that matched a previous query.…”

Overview Scrollbar: A Scrollbar Showing an Entire Document as an Overview

“…On the basis of these improvements, much research was done afterwards [2,3,4,5], but most of it was simple functions added to traditional scrollbars and did not mention drastic modifications such as our wider scrollbar. Document visualization research has been done in the field of HCI.…”

Adding Boolean-Quality Control to Best-Match Searching via an Improved User Interface

“…Swing contains an object-oriented GUI toolkit, and the capability it offered of overriding methods of GUI objects greatly eased implementation of one visualization (see Byrd 1999). For simplicity, the initial version of the system does not support any form of query expansion (relevance feedback, LCA, etc.…”

“…Although our motivation for beginning this work involved expert searchers, we are equally interested in " ordinary" users, and Byrd (1999) describes in some detail a formal user study of Vquery-doc2 with a population of students. Here is a summary of the study and its conclusions.…”

“…Joanne Claussen of Westlaw and Daniel Pliske of Lexis/Nexis provided information on Boolean versus natural language usage of their respective services. Karen Priore and Andy Wolan administered the user study described in Byrd (1999) and summarized above. Byrd (1998) describes interviews with nine professional librarians, two in public libraries and seven in a large university library; the university librarians were Eric Esau, Larry Feldman, Emily Hurn, Naka Ishii, Pam Juengling, Barbara Morgan, and Emily Silverman.…”