ABSTRACT
Reading of electronic documents is becoming increasingly important as more information is disseminated electronically. We present an experiment that compares the usability of a linear, a fisheye, and an overview+detail interface for electronic documents. Using these interfaces, 20 subjects wrote essays and answered questions about scientific documents. Essays written using the overview+detail interface received higher grades, while subjects using the fisheye interface read documents faster. However, subjects used more time to answer questions with the overview+detail interface. All but one subject preferred the overview+detail interface. The most common interface in practical use, the linear interface, is found to be inferior to the fisheye and overview+detail interfaces regarding most aspects of usability. We recommend using overview+detail interfaces for electronic documents, while fisheye interfaces mainly should be considered for time-critical tasks.
- 1.Belkin, N. J. Interaction with texts: Information retrieval as information-seeking behavior, in Information retrieval '93. Von der Modellierung zur Anwendung (Konstanz, Sep 1993), Universitaetsverlag Konstanz, 55-66.Google Scholar
- 2.Bishop, A. P. Working Towards an Understanding of Digital Library Use, D-Lib Magazine, October 1995 (1995).Google ScholarCross Ref
- 3.Bishop, A. P. Digital libraries and knowledge disaggregation: the use of journal article components, in Proceedings of Digital Libraries '98 (Pittsburgh PA, Jun 1998), ACM Press, 29-39. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 4.Boguraev, B., Kennedy, C., Bellamy, R., Brawer, S., & Wong, Y. Y. Dynamic presentation of document content for rapid online skimming, in AAAI Spring 1998 Symposium on Intelligent Text Summarization (Stanford CA, Mar 1998), AAAI Press, 109-118.Google Scholar
- 5.Bradow, R., Mitze, K., & Rau, L. F. Automatic Condensation of Electronic Publications by Sentence Selection, Information Processing & Management, 31, 5 (1995), 675-685. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 6.Byrd, D. A scrollbar-based visualization for document navigation, in Proceedings of Digital libraries '99 (Berkeley CA, Aug 1999), ACM Press, 122-129. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 7.Byrne, M. D., John, B. E., Wehrle, N. S., & Crow, D. C. The tangled web we wove: a taskonomy of WWW use, in Proceeding of CHI '99 (Pittsburgh PA, May 1999), ACM Press, 544-551. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 8.Card, S. K., Mackinlay, J. D., & Shneiderman, B. Readings in Information Visualization, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco CA, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 9.Chen, C. & Rada, R. Interacting With Hypertext:A Meta- Analysis of Experimental Studies, Human-Computer Interaction, 11, 2 (1996), 125-156. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 10.Dee-Lucas, D. & Larkin, J. H. Learning From Electronic Texts: Effects of Interactive Overview for Information Access, Cognition and Instruction, 13, 3 (1995), 431-468.Google ScholarCross Ref
- 11.Dillon, A. Designing Usable Electronic Text, Taylor & Francis, London, 1993. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 12.Egan, D. E., Remde, J. R., Gomez, L. M., Landauer, T. K., Eberhardt, J., & Lochbaum, C. C. Formative Design-Evaluation of SuperBook, ACM Transaction on Information Systems, 7, 1 (1989), 30-57. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 13.Eick, S. G., Steffen, J. L., & Sumner, E. E. Seesoft-A Tool for Visualizing Line Oriented Software Statistics, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 18,11 (1992),957-968. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 14.Frokj~r, E., Hertzum, M., & Hornb~k, K. Measuring usability: are effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction really correlated?, in Proceedings of CHI 2000 (The Hague Netherlands, Apr 2000), ACM Press, 345-352. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 15.Furnas, G. W. Generalized fisheye views, in Proceedings of CHI '86 (Boston MA, Apr 1986), ACM Press, 16-23. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 16.Graham, J. The reader's helper: a personalized document reading environment, in Proceeding of CHI '99 (Pittsburgh PA, May 1999), ACM Press, 481-488. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 17.Holmquist, L. E. Focus+Context Visualization with Flip Zooming and the Zoom Browser, in CHI '97 Extended Abstracts (Atlanta GA, Mar 1997), ACM Press, 263-264. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 18.Kaugars, K. Integrated multi scale text retrieval visualization, in CHI '98 Summary (Los Angeles CA, Apr 1998), ACM Press, 307-308. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 19.Kupiec, J., Pedersen, J., & Chen, F. A trainable document summarizer, in Proceedings of SIGIR '95 (Seattle WA, Jul 1995), ACM Press, 68-73. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 20.Marchionini, G. Information Seeking in Electronic Environments, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 21.Marcus, A. Graphic Design for Electronic Documents and User Interfaces, ACM Press, New York NY, 1992. Google Scholar
- 22.O'Hara, K. & Sellen, A. A comparison of reading paper and online documents, in Proceedings of CHI '97 (Atlanta GA, Mar 1997), ACM Press, 335-342. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 23.Paez, L. B., da Silva-Fh., J. B., & Marchionini, G. Disorientation in Electronic Environments: A Study of Hypertext and Continuous Zooming Interfaces, in Proceedings of ASIS '96 (Baltimore MD, Nov 1996), 58-66.Google Scholar
- 24.Plaisant, C., Carr, D., & Shneiderman, B. Image Browsers: Taxonomy, Guidelines, and Informal Specifications, IEEE Software, 12, 2 (1995), 21-32. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 25.Robertson, G. G. & Mackinlay, J. D. The document lens, in Proceedings of UIST '93 (Atlanta GA, Nov 1993), ACM Press, 101-108. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 26.Schriver, K. Dynamics in Document Presentation, John Wiley & Sons, New York/London, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 27.Sellen, A. & Harper, R. Paper as an analytic resource for the design of new technologies, in Proceedings of CHI '97 (Atlanta GA, Mar 1997), ACM Press, 319-326. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 28.Sparck Jones, K. & Willett, P. Readings in Information Retrieval, Morgan Kaufman, San Francisco CA, 1997. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 29.Tomney, H. & Burton, P. F. Electronic Journals: a Study of Usage and Attitudes Among Academics, Journal of Information Science, 24, 6 (1998), 419-429.Google ScholarDigital Library
- 30.Wright, P. Cognitive overheads and prostheses: some issues in evaluating hypertexts, in Proceedings of the third annual ACM conference on Hypertext (San Antonio TX, Dec 1991), ACM Press, 1-12. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Reading of electronic documents: the usability of linear, fisheye, and overview+detail interfaces
Recommendations
Reading patterns and usability in visualizations of electronic documents
We present an exploration of reading patterns and usability in visualizations of electronic documents. Twenty subjects wrote essays and answered questions about scientific documents using an overview+detail, a fisheye, and a linear interface. We study ...
Navigation patterns and usability of zoomable user interfaces with and without an overview
The literature on information visualization establishes the usability of interfaces with an overview of the information space, but for zoomable user interfaces, results are mixed. We compare zoomable user interfaces with and without an overview to ...
Clustering-Based Visual Interfaces for Presentation of Web Search Results: An Empirical Investigation
The result of a typical web search is often overwhelming. It is very difficult to explore the textual listing of the resulting documents, which may be in the thousands. In order to improve the utility of the search experience, we explore presenting ...
Comments