Evaluation of a System Layer Design for the Visual Knowledge Builder

When users are searching for documents, they must sift through a collection of potentially relevant documents assessing, categorizing and prioritizing them based on the current task at hand, a process we refer to as document triage. Since users' time is precious, as much information as possible should be presented to them to aid the process of document triage. This thesis presents a simple visualization and a set of features that can help users in identifying information of interest. As a part of this thesis, the System Layer of the Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB) was developed as a tab strip container. Each of the tabs presents a different type of information about Web Documents. The types of information currently included in VKB are: a summary of the Web Document, keywords based on users' interests provided by the Interest Profile Manager (IPM), popular keywords from a social bookmarking site, metadata about the Web Document, a list of outgoing links of the Web Document, and the history of the Web Document. We performed a heuristic evaluation to assess the usefulness of the new visualization and features. During the evaluation, participants were asked to rate the usefulness of each of the new web document features over a scale of 1 to 7, where a value of 1 indicated strong disagreement, and 7 indicated strong agreement. Our results indicate that the document summary, the keywords from IPM, popular tags, and the history of the Web Document are expected to be most useful during the process of document triage