On Search Powered Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of search powered navigation, demonstrating through a user study that integrating search with navigation significantly enhances exploratory search effectiveness and user experience.

Contribution

It empirically investigates the impact of search powered navigation on user behavior and shows its importance for tasks requiring narrow domain document retrieval.

Findings

Search enables depth-first, bottom-up exploration.

Navigation alone leads to breadth-first, top-down exploration.

Search functionality is crucial for narrow domain information retrieval.

Abstract

Query-based searching and browsing-based navigation are the two main components of exploratory search. Search lets users dig in deep by controlling their actions to focus on and find just the information they need, whereas navigation helps them to get an overview to decide which content is most important. In this paper, we introduce the concept of "search powered navigation" and investigate the effect of empowering navigation with search functionality on information seeking behavior of users and their experience by conducting a user study on exploratory search tasks, differentiated by different types of information needs. Our main findings are as follows: First, we observe radically different search tactics. Using search, users are able to control and augment their search focus, hence they explore the data in a depth-first, bottom-up manner. Conversely, using pure navigation they tend to check different options to be able to decide on their path into the data, which corresponds to a breadth-first, top-down exploration. Second, we observe a general natural tendency to combine aspects of search and navigation, however, our experiments show that the search functionality is essential to solve exploratory search tasks that require finding documents related to a narrow domain. Third, we observe a natural need for search powered navigation: users using a system without search functionality find creative ways to mimic searching using navigation.