Evaluating navigational surrogate formats with divergent browsing tasks

Abstract

Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search engine result sets, e-commerce sites, and digital libraries. They also form the basis of personal collections of media, such as web pages. Our hypothesis is that the formats of individual surrogates and collections play an important role in how people use collections. We are particularly interested in processes of information discovery, in which ideas are iteratively reformulated in the context of working with information.To investigate how the representation of navigational surrogates affects how people work with information, we have created a collection of undergraduate psychology curriculum resources in 3 alternative formats: a linear list of textual elements, a spatialized set of textual elements, and a spatialized set of labeled images that have been composited. To evaluate navigation with these surrogate formats during information discovery, we designed divergent browsing tasks, that is, tasks that require assembling information from multiple diverse sources. A within-subjects evaluation indicates that users prefer the spatial labeled images format, and navigate more effectively with it.

An Experimental Method for Measuring the Emergence of New Ideas in Information Discovery

“…Qualitative data gives insight into how the composition form promotes distributed creative cognition when students use composition to represent prior work collections in collaborative invention projects (Kerne et al, 2007b). In all of these studies, and others (Kerne et al, 2005), most participants have preferred the composition to linear text representations, and experienced composition as easier to use.…”

“…Composition means, "The act of putting together or combining … as parts or elements of a whole" (Oxford English Dictionary, 1992). The present research builds on a prior laboratory study (Kerne et al, 2005), which showed that users subjectively experience composition as an easier-to-use representation for navigational collections.…”

“…In one experimental condition, the source collection representation was a set of compositions of image and text surrogates that we had previously authored using combinFormation (Kerne et al, 2005). To form answers, the students, none of whom had previously worked with composition, used direct-manipulation-only combinFormation to author annotated collections of information surrogates in the composition of image and text surrogates format.…”

Promoting emergence in information discovery by representing collections with composition

“…We utilized a previously developed collection of information resources that represent six areas of the psychology curriculum: clinical psychology, consciousness, biopsychology, learning, developmental psychology, and perception [22]. For each area, there were six to ten information resources, each representing a subtopic.…”

Elimination of junk document surrogate candidates through pattern recognition

“…Most responses to search queries are represented in the form of lists of textual surrogates [14,32,35]. Yet, studies have shown that users prefer image and text surrogates and understand them more readily [10,20]. Further, image and text representations facilitate the formation of mental models [13].…”