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Backward highlighting: enhancing faceted search

Published: 19 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Directional faceted browsers, such as the popular column browser iTunes, let a person pick an instance from any column-facet to start their search for music. The expected effect is that any columns to the right are filtered. In keeping with this directional filtering from left to right, however, the unexpected effect is that the columns to the left of the click provide no information about the possible associations to the selected item. In iTunes, this means that any selection in the Album column on the right returns no information about either the Artists (immediate left) or Genres (leftmost) associated with the chosen album.
Backward Highlighting (BH) is our solution to this problem, which allows users to see and utilize, during search, associations in columns to the left of a selection in a directional column browser like iTunes. Unlike other possible solutions, this technique allows such browsers to keep direction in their filtering, and so provides users with the best of both directional and non-directional styles. As well as describing BH in detail, this paper presents the results of a formative user study, showing benefits for both information discovery and subsequent retention in memory.

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  • (2024)Balancing Act: Boosting Strategies for Informed Search on Controversial TopicsProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638329(254-265)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
  • (2022)Understanding the “Pathway” Towards a Searcher’s Learning ObjectiveACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/349522240:4(1-43)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Learning assessments in search-as-learningInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2021.10282159:2Online publication date: 9-May-2022
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cover image ACM Conferences
UIST '08: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
October 2008
308 pages
ISBN:9781595939753
DOI:10.1145/1449715
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 19 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. columns
  2. context
  3. faceted
  4. highlights
  5. search

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Balancing Act: Boosting Strategies for Informed Search on Controversial TopicsProceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3627508.3638329(254-265)Online publication date: 10-Mar-2024
  • (2022)Understanding the “Pathway” Towards a Searcher’s Learning ObjectiveACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/349522240:4(1-43)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2022
  • (2022)Learning assessments in search-as-learningInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2021.10282159:2Online publication date: 9-May-2022
  • (2020)Choice-Based User Interface Design of a Smart Healthy Food Recommender System for Nudging Eating Behavior of Older Adult Patients with Newly Diagnosed Type II DiabetesHuman Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Healthy and Active Aging10.1007/978-3-030-50249-2_17(221-234)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2020
  • (2018)Visual Interfaces for Recommendation SystemsACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/320049010:1(1-23)Online publication date: 28-Nov-2018
  • (2015)The influence of task type on search experience from the perspective of time constraintProceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/meet.2014.1450510113351:1(1-4)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2015
  • (2015)Multi‐aspect information use task performance: The roles of topic knowledge, task structure, and task stageProceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/meet.2014.1450510103151:1(1-10)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2015
  • (2015)Searching as learning: Novel measures for information interaction researchProceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology10.1002/meet.2014.1450510102151:1(1-4)Online publication date: 24-Apr-2015
  • (2014)Browse-to-SearchACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/263042032:4(1-27)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2014
  • (2014)Search Effectiveness and Efficiency of Facet-Based Online Catalog: A Crossover Study of Novice UsersThe Emergence of Digital Libraries – Research and Practices10.1007/978-3-319-12823-8_30(288-299)Online publication date: 2014
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