Acceptance of visual search interfaces for the Web - Design and empirical evaluation of a book search interface

Abstract

Theoretically, visual search interfaces are supposed to out-perform list interfaces for such task types as nonspecific queries because they make use of additional semantic information (like price, date or review for a book). But why are web sites like Amazon or eBay still using classical textual list interfaces? Many visual interfaces performed well on objective measures (retrieval time, precision or recall). But subjective factors (ease, joy, usefulness) determining their acceptance in practice are often neglected. Therefore, we created a graphical interface for searching books and evaluated it in a 51 participant study. The study builds on the technology acceptance model which measures users' subjective attitude towards using an interface. We found that the variable enjoyment is of higher relevance in both visual and textual search interfaces than previously stated. Finally, the novel interface yielded significantly better results for book searches than the textual one. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.