Watch Less and Uncover More: Could Navigation Tools Help Users Search and Explore Videos?

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Content Flow Bar, a novel video navigation tool that uses semantic snippets to help users browse and discover relevant video content more efficiently, enhancing search and exploration.

Contribution

The paper presents a new user interface tool, the Content Flow Bar, which improves video browsing by providing semantic snippets and visual cues for better content discovery.

Findings

Participants found the tool helpful and enjoyable.

Interaction logs show increased content discoverability.

Supports efficient browsing and exploration in videos.

Abstract

Prior research has shown how 'content preview tools' improve speed and accuracy of user relevance judgements across different information retrieval tasks. This paper describes a novel user interface tool, the Content Flow Bar, designed to allow users to quickly identify relevant fragments within informational videos to facilitate browsing, through a cognitively augmented form of navigation. It achieves this by providing semantic "snippets" that enable the user to rapidly scan through video content. The tool provides visually-appealing pop-ups that appear in a time series bar at the bottom of each video, allowing to see in advance and at a glance how topics evolve in the content. We conducted a user study to evaluate how the tool changes the users search experience in video retrieval, as well as how it supports exploration and information seeking. The user questionnaire revealed that participants found the Content Flow Bar helpful and enjoyable for finding relevant information in videos. The interaction logs of the user study, where participants interacted with the tool for completing two informational tasks, showed that it holds promise for enhancing discoverability of content both across and within videos. This discovered potential could leverage a new generation of navigation tools in search and information retrieval.