Readings for 10/19

In the paper titled "Design of 3-D Visualization of Search Results" the authors have carefully analyzed the pros and cons of various visualizations that would aid designers approaching document visualizations. What all the prototypes had in common was that theyseem to lay emphasis on bringing together keywords that shared a meaning. This inevitably led to the problems of clustering and how to represent clusters without imposing a cognitive over-load on the user. The evolution of the 3-D model seemed to solve the problem to a certain extent. Although the direct motivation was to allow the user to see several titles at once, it seems tasking to distinguish so much text that are not very distant, given the limitation of screen space available to represent them. I personally feel many of the prototypes were over-designed for the problem at hand. It seemed to me that the user was not the center of the design but the design itself was in focus, the user's job is moved to making judgements on whether a design worked for him or not.

In the Concept Globe Design, they talk about embedding 2D navigation within the 3D globe representation. This is specially useful when the user wants to inspect a cluster, giving the option to "decide whether to display just an overview of the entire result set, or show details selectively". Also, it would have been a better reading if, in the conclusion, they had elaborated more on the concept of "restructuring", because that seemed to be the key to an better visualization.

I all sold for the idea of adding context to search results, especially if searching for something specific, when I have only a vague idea of where my search fits in. Context gives me cognitive cues that would improve my navigational speed across sites and make me narrow down my choices, accelerating decision-making. What would be cool for me, is that while I'm entering my keyword, categories relevant to my search are displayed and I can narrow down my categories and then continue search. However it could make interesting research to find ways to tackle the situation of results that can appear in multiple categories. This may add to an additional level of complexity for the user to navigate through.