Backward Highlighting: Enhancing Faceted Search
Proceedings of the 21st Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST2008), (April 2008)Abstract
Directional faceted browsers, like the popular columnar browser iTunes, let a person pick an instance from any col-umn-facet to start their search for music. The expected ef-fect 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 associa-tions to the selected item. In iTunes, this means that any selection in the Album column on the right returns no in-formation about either the Artists (immediate left) or Gen-res (leftmost) associated with the chosen album.
Backward Highlighting is our solution to this problem, which allows users to see and utilize, during search, asso-ciations in columns to the left of a selection in a directional column browser like iTunes. Unlike other possible solu-tions, 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. Providing the tech-nique is not cheap, however, as it produces significantly more queries over the data. As well as describing the detail of Backward Highlighting, this paper presents the results of a formative user study into the benefits the technique pro-vides to users. System designers can then determine whether the technique should be used given both the sys-tem costs and the significant benefits shown for informa-tion discovery and subsequent retention in memory.