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A Field Experiment of Spatially-Stable Overviews for Document Navigation

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Finding (and re-finding) locations in text documents is a common activity for most computer users -- but tools for document navigation are still limited in many ways. Previous research has shown that a spatially-stable overview of the entire document can be substantially faster than any other navigation technique -- particularly when revisiting previous locations. However, the overview technique has only been tested in a limited laboratory study, so little is known about whether it works in more realistic contexts. To answer this question, we developed a PDF viewer that incorporates several document-navigation techniques, and carried out two studies. First, we ran a field experiment in which users carried out search tasks using an overview and other techniques -- on their own computers in a non-laboratory environment. Second, we ran a smaller field study in which people used our viewer (with choice of navigation techniques) for their own PDF tasks. In the field experiment, the overview was significantly and substantially faster than other techniques, and in the field study, the technique was frequently used for a wide variety of documents. Our work provides confirmation of the value of spatially stable overviews as a basis for document navigation.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2017
    7138 pages
    ISBN:9781450346559
    DOI:10.1145/3025453
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    Published: 02 May 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. document navigation
    2. scrolling
    3. space-filling thumbnails

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    • (2023)HOOV: Hand Out-Of-View Tracking for Proprioceptive Interaction using Inertial SensingProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581468(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)User Evaluation of Conversational Agents for Aerospace DomainInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2023.223954440:19(5549-5568)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2023
    • (2022)Optimizing word search within documents by showing results in the contextJournal of Visualization10.1007/s12650-022-00880-526:2(441-455)Online publication date: 26-Sep-2022
    • (2021)Relation Artefacts Type IVHuman Work Interaction Design10.1007/978-3-030-71796-4_6(107-132)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2021
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    • (2018)Improving revisitation in long documents with two-level artificial-landmark scrollbarsProceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces10.1145/3206505.3206554(1-9)Online publication date: 29-May-2018
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