The Design and Evaluation of Six Presentation Styles for Information Retrieval Search Results

The linear list presentation of results used by most information retrieval systems does not help the user to evaluate the results for relevance. Five alternative presentations, one tabular and four graphical, were designed and implemented. Three of the graphical presentations, bar charts, matrix charts, and scatter plots were existing techniques. The fourth, document maps, was a new visualisation developed to address the weaknesses of the existing techniques for supporting the results evaluation task. A comparative evaluation found that users of the tabular and graphical presentations performed results evaluation tasks significantly faster and significantly more accurately than the users of the linear list. No overall difference was found between the tabular and graphical presentations, contradicting previous research. The document map users performed document similarity tasks significantly faster than, and with the same high degree of accuracy as, the users of the other tabular and graphical presentations. Furthermore, the document map received the highest subjective usability rating.