Improving How Users Organize Web Information for Gathering Tasks

Abstract

This paper presents a Visual Information Management System (VIMS) for the Web. In this prototype system, the task of Web information gathering was taken into consideration with respect to how users locate information for the task, organize task information, preserve and re-find task information, and compare information for effective reasoning and decision making. VIMS was designed and built based on recommendations from previous studies in a larger research. A user study was conducted to evaluate VIMS. The results of the study show promising indications of the improvements achieved in VIMS with respect to Web information gathering tasks.