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| Searching: a trade-off between logic order and
structure? |
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| by Fred
Voorhorst (Manno, 2000) |
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The Fantastic
corporation offers a system for pushing large quantities
of data to a customer's PC. In addition, it offers a so-called
portal to browse this data (see image on the left).
Typically, these portals are designed for browsing relatively
small amounts of data, such as the example here which offers the
user choice from four channels at the time.
With a larger offering, the user is forced to browse and the manner
in which information is organized may either help or hinder the user.
The experiment described here investigates the effect of visual structure on the ability (speed and comfort) to find items.
Visual structure is devided into two parts: the actual structure and the amount of this structure that is visible. |
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Actual structure has two values: structured or chaotic. When structured the data is showed in aphabetic order. When not, it is displayed randomly.
The amount of structure that is visible has influence on the number of lines shown (4, 8 or 16) or the number of comumns in which the data is organized (1, 2 or 3).
For each of the 18 possible conditions, the user is presented with an item that has to be found in the data structure. The user can decide that the item is impossible to be found. After completing the task, the user has to indicate how easy it was to find the item. In addition, time and number of mouse clicks are recorded. |
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Results, see below, show that both performance and ease of use increase with the display of structure.
The ability to find items depends on the structure, which arrises from ordering items alphabetically or from ordering in layers.
The number of items shown affected the time needed to find an object. An optimum was suggested for eight eitems.
Similar to performance also the perceived ease increases with structure.
The number of mouse clicks reduce with the number of layers, only when the data is chaotically organized. |
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| In sum, any structure will improve the find-ability of items and reduce time and number of mouse clicks.
Interestingly, a structure in layers compensate for the lack of (aphabetic) order.
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