Leveraging user inspiration with microblogging-driven exploratory search

Abstract

In creative tasks, the user expects to acquire holistic information, to explore the space of available information and to come up with diverse views before converging to a solution for the creative task. We hypothesize that the implicit use of social chatter in information seeking activities can enhance the potential for novel, diverse and unexpected encounters which can in turn inspire users. We present an interactive exploratory search tool that combines diversification of content and sources with a user interface design that visualises cues from the social chatter generated with microblogging services such as Twitter and lets users interactively explore the available information space. A taskbased user study comparing our system to a query-based baseline indicates that our system significantly improves inspirational discoveries by providing access to more interesting, novel and unexpected information. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.