Evaluation of visual aid suite for desktop searching

Abstract

The task of searching for documents is becoming more challenging as the volumes of data stored continues to increase, and retrieval systems produce longer results list. Graphical visualisations can assist users to more efficiently and effectively understand large volumes of information. This work investigates the use of multiple visualisations in a desktop search tool. These visualisations include a List View, Tree View, Map View, Bubble View, Tile View and Cloud View. A preliminary evaluation was undertaken by 94 participants to gauge its potential usefulness and to detect usability issues with its interface and graphical presentations. The evaluation results show that these visualisations made it easier and quicker for them to find relevant documents. All of the evaluators found at least one of the visualisations useful and over half of them found at least three of the visualisations to be useful. The evaluation results support the research premise that a combination of integrated visualisations will result in a more effective search tool. The next stage of work is to improve the current views in light of the evaluation findings in preparation for the scalability and longitudinal tests for a series of increasingly larger result sets of documents. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.