An investigation of dynamic landmarking functions

ABSTRACT

It is easy for users to lose awareness of their location and orientation when navigating large information spaces. Providing landmarks is one common technique that helps users remain oriented, alleviating the mental workload and reducing the number of redundant interactions. But how many landmarks should be displayed? We conducted an empirical evaluation of several relationships between the number of potential landmarked items in the display and the number of landmarks rendered at any one time, with results strongly favouring a logarithmic relationship.

REFERENCES

• 1: G. L. Allen, A. W. Siegel, and R. R. Rosinski. The role of perceptual context in structuring spatial knowledge. J. Experimental Psychology: Human Learning & Memory, 4(6):617--630, November 1978.
• 2: George W. Furnas, Effective view navigation, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.367-374, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258800]
• 3: W. E. Hick. On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly J. Experimental Psychology, 4:11--26, 1952.
• 4: J. Hochberg and L. Gellman. The effect of landmark features on mental rotation times. Memory and Cognition, 5(1):23--26, 1977.
• 5: Anthony J. Hornof, Visual search and mouse-pointing in labeled versus unlabeled two-dimensional visual hierarchies, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.8 n.3, p.171-197, September 2001 [doi>10.1145/502907.502908]
• 6: R. Hyman. Stimulus information as a determinant of reaction time. J. Experimental Psychology, 45(3):188--196, 1953.
• 7: Susanne Jul , George W. Furnas, Critical zones in desert fog: aids to multiscale navigation, Proceedings of the 11th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.97-106, November 01-04, 1998, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/288392.288578]
• 8: G. A. Miller. The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. The Psychological Review, 63:81--97, 1956.
• 9: Peter Pirolli, Computational models of information scent-following in a very large browsable text collection, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.3-10, March 22-27, 1997, Atlanta, Georgia, United States [doi>10.1145/258549.258558]
• 10: P. Pirolli and S. Card. Information foraging. Psychological Review, 106(4):643--675, October 1999.
• 11: A. Treisman. Perceptual grouping and attention in visual search for features and for objects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 8(2):194--214, April 1982.
• 12: David D. Woods, Visual momentum: a concept to improve the cognitive coupling of person and computer, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, v.21 n.3, p.229-244, Sept. 1984 [doi>10.1016/S0020-7373(84)80043-7]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Keywords:
information scent, landmarks, navigation, navigational aids, visual clutter, visual search