Of Kings, Traffic Signs and Flowers: Exploring Navigation of Tagged DocumentsJacek Gwizdka, Department of Library and Information Science
CONTACT:
www.jsg.tel
http://bit.ly/tagtrails Process of Tagging
Process of Tagging and Tag-space
• Users associate tags with web resources
• Tags serve in social, structural, and semantic role– structural role: starting points for navigation; helping users to orient themselves
– semantic role: description of a set of associated resources
• Tag space: set of web resources with associated tags (descriptors)
many-to-manyrelationships
An Example of Navigation (CiteULike)
information retrieval algorithms phylogeny
An Example of Navigation (CiteULike)
• Pivot browsing: a lightweight navigation mechanism; users reorient view
• Each navigation step is treated as separate – At each step context is switched
– Relationships between steps are not shown • e.g., overlap between tag clouds not indicated
1. information 2. retrieval 3. algorithms 4. phylogeny
Research Questions
• How can we support continuity in “tag-space” navigation?
• How do people understand navigation in tag-space?
User Interface with “History tag clouds” (Tag Trails)
Supporting continuity in tag-space navigation by providing history
information retrieval algorithms phylogeny
History tag clouds
User Interface with Heat map (Tag Trails)
Supporting continuity in tag-space navigation by providing history and making (some) relationships (more) explicit
Tag cloud
Results list
Column-tags: most recentlyvisited tags from left to right
Row-tags: selection of most frequent tags
Cells color-coded according to tag’s df
Heat map
Navigation History and Relationships in Heat map
User Study
• Exploratory study
• 10 study sessions each with a pair* of participants• 18 participants working in pairs
• 3 tasks, each using a different variation of the interface• data set from CiteULike (also deli.cio.us)
• paired talk aloud protocol
• interaction log and screen cam recorded
• debriefing– interview
– draw what they experienced • using physical world analogies
User Interfaces
Results
• focus on qualitative results
The Kingdom
• Hierarchical relationship between tags
The Space
• Notion of distance
• Navigation – movement in one direction: to weaker associations
• Relative to the initial tag
The Labyrinth
• Location, movement, distance
• Location, movement, distance
The Journey
The “Flower-picking” Journey
The Conversation
• Topic drift
User Expectations
• Successive navigation steps related to the initial tag– if the initial tag missing, a few users restarted the process
• “Search” results narrowed down
Summary & Conclusions
• Users experience “switching”, yet expect some continuity
• Pivot browsing seems to be conceptually not lightweight– conceptualizing multiple tags assigned in different quantities to different documents is difficult
• Users may be (to some extent) misunderstanding navigation in tag-spaces
• Future work: support navigation continuity – simplify user interface, two alternatives:
• a tag cloud based on some formula that incorporates previously “visited” tags
• a further developed heat map
• Study limitations include:– a small sample; a short time ; a perhaps atypical task for a tag-based navigation
Thank you! Questions?
Jacek Gwizdka, School of Communication & Information, Rutgers U.
CONTACT [email protected]
& http://jsg.tel
MORE INFO http://bit.ly/tagtrails
Bonus slides
User Interface with the Heat map - Tooltip
Interface with a heat map and history tag clouds