An Exploratory Search User Interface Concept Supporting Vague Querying and a Novel Result Representation

Common search engines deliver quite good results when the user has a precise notion of what he is looking for. However, the user might have in mind additional prior information regarding the importance of specific terms. Consequently, it seems desirable to avoid the latter and incorporate the knowledge into the query instead. Therefore, we propose a search user interface concept that supports users in modelling their uncertainty in a comfortable way, foster exploratory search and provide a compact yet informative representation of results. An implemented prototype demonstrates the feasibility of the concept. We also present results of a first twostep usability study. The results indicate a good usability of the concept and show that even this novel concept meets user’s expectations.