FacetScape: A Visualization for Exploring the Search Space

Despite advancing search technologies, information overload has not yet been solved. Getting an overview of information or explorative access to information becomes increasingly difficult with the exponentially increasing amount of information. Search result visualizations, especially for faceted browsing, aim at supporting users to find their way through large document collections. We propose FacetScape, a novel visualization for navigation and refinement of search results allowing users to visually construct complex boolean search queries for narrowing down the search space. This visualization combines Voronoi subdivision and a tag cloud representation of the search facets. Further it includes a preview of action (query preview) and interactions to allow users to focus on important aspects of the data for the task at hand. In a comparative user study with 15 users we compared the visualization to a standard faceted browsing interface for different types of search tasks. The study revealed that participants used the unfamiliar interface as efficiently and effectively as the familiar tree-like display. Results indicate that the FacetScape is a promising way of supporting users in exploring the faceted search space.