Trailblazer - Towards the Design of an Exploratory Search User Interface

When conceptualizing user interfaces (UIs) to support exploratory search, designers need to take into account various aspects. In contrast to ordinary information retrieval UIs, exploratory search user interfaces (XSIs) need to support users in a more complex and often long term use scenario. An XSI needs to provide a visually appealing overview over retrieved search results, it should offer simple ways to interact with the result set and offer easy ways of interaction to enhance the user’s search experience by direct or indirect query refinement options. In this paper we identify the requirements of a specific XSI concept, describe this XSI concept and its features & present first results of a conducted usability study. Author