Ch. 10: Information Visualization for Search Interfaces
The preceding chapters have discussed user interfaces to support search, with a focus on what is known to be successful (from a usability perspective) for the vast majority of searchers. This and the following chapter describe efforts to improve search interfaces by incorporating visual information into the display using techniques from the field of information visualization.
The human perceptual system is highly attuned to images, and visual representations can communicate some kinds of information more rapidly and effectively than text. For example, the familiar bar chart or line graph can be much more evocative of the underlying data than the corresponding table of numbers (Larkin and Simon, 1987a) . The goal of information visualization is to translate abstract information into a visual form that provides new insight about that information. Visualization has been shown to be successful at providing insight about data for a wide range of tasks.
” Information Visualization for Search Interfaces (Ch 10) | Search User Interfaces | Marti Hearst | Cambridge University Press 2009