Task related Navigation in Information Spaces
Alistair Sutcliffe
Centre for HCI Design
School of Informatics
City University
Northampton Square
London EC1V 0HB, UK
+44-171-477-8411
e-mail: A.G.Sutcliffe@city.ac.uk
Visualisation of information spaces for browsing and information retrieval has been a popular theme in CHI research, see for instance the SEMNET (Fairchild e al 1988) and Information visualiser projects (Mackinlay et al 1991). However, even though several different metaphors for structuring visual information maps have appeared, such as 3D cones, butterflies, and rooms, few usability evaluations have been carried out and we have little understanding of how such images function to help navigation. Indeed, one of the few evaluation reports on 3D information browsing interfaces showed that complex visualisations had little advantage in terms of usability or search efficiency and user only remembered the high level 'gist' structure of the image.