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Scented widgets: improving navigation cues with embedded visualizations.

Wesley Willett1, Jeffrey Heer, Maneesh Agrawala

  • 1Computer Science Division at the University of California at Berkeley, USA. willettw@cs.berkeley.edu

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
|October 31, 2007
PubMed
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Scented widgets, graphical user interface controls with embedded visualizations, improve data exploration. Users exploring unfamiliar data made twice as many discoveries with these enhanced widgets.

Area of Science:

  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Information Visualization
  • Software Engineering

Background:

  • Traditional graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can be challenging for navigating complex information spaces.
  • Enhancing standard user interface (UI) elements with visual cues can potentially improve user experience and data discovery.
  • The integration of social navigation data into UI elements is an emerging area of research.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To introduce and evaluate "scented widgets," which are GUI controls augmented with embedded visualizations.
  • To provide design guidelines and a software framework for implementing scented widgets.
  • To assess the impact of scented widgets on user navigation and data discovery in information spaces.

Main Methods:

  • Development of design guidelines for embedding visualizations into common UI widgets (e.g., radio buttons, sliders, combo boxes).

Related Experiment Videos

  • Creation of a general software framework to facilitate the integration of scented widgets into existing applications.
  • Conducting a controlled experiment to compare user performance with and without scented widgets.

    • Main Results:

    • Users exploring unfamiliar data demonstrated up to a twofold increase in unique discoveries when using scented widgets.
    • The effectiveness of scented widgets in enhancing discovery diminished as users gained familiarity with the data.
    • The software framework allowed for minimal modifications to existing source code for widget implementation.

    Conclusions:

    • Scented widgets offer a promising approach to enhance navigation and discovery in information spaces, particularly for unfamiliar data.
    • The benefits of scented widgets are most pronounced in the initial stages of data exploration.
    • The developed framework and design guidelines support the practical application of scented widgets in software development.