Communicating content: development and evaluation of icons for academic document triage through visualisation and perception

Abstract

This work seeks to identify key features and characteristics for the design of icons that can support the tasks of information seekers in academic document triage interfaces. Such icons are meant to act as visual links to the specific elements or sections in an academic document. We suggest that icons in triage interfaces, are better able to communicate information, provide feedback and enable faster user interactions than text, particularly in mobile-based interfaces. Through investigation of visualisation and perception processes, we are able to propose five primary icon categories, the two most dominant being iconic and symbolic: iconic representations mostly apply to graphically and spatially distinct document elements (i.e. Title, Abstract, Tables and Figures) KeywordsIcons, interface design, visual representation, academic document triage, visualization, perception 2 Academic document triage is defined as the act of assessing and evaluating a set of structured documents in order to determine their relevance to an information need (Loizides 2010). This process has been exponentially increasing in the past years due to the digital access of journals by academics and professionals such as patent examiners. Because of the vast amount of information, made available with online digital libraries, document triage is a demanding, time-consuming and error-prone (Jones et al. 1999) process for information seekers. Existing research provides some information on designing usable triage interfaces mainly for desktop computers (Mavri et al. 2014); there is, however, minimal to no direction regarding small screen interfaces.Tablets and smartphones have emerged as vital for information seeking and communication 'on the go', as statistics indicate about 60% of adults using a smartphone to go online (Ofcom 2015). The content of most websites and applications is largely adaptive in order to accommodate for the smaller screen real estate. However, some interfaces fail to provide the information seeker with an interface that addresses his/her specific needs, for example, when a user is working with large amounts of text, as in structured documents (i.e. academic documents). Both structure and content can be problematic, due to the known limitations of mobile devices, the most important being the limited screen size that results in small-sized characters, narrow line length and compromised navigation (Ling and Van Schaik 2006;Budiu 2015; Nielsen 2011;Sahito et al. 2015). Wishing to read specific sections in an academic document (a common triage behaviour), equals scrolling through thousands of words) (Loizides and Buchanan 2009); panning on a mobile device, can become physically strenuous, and scroll acceleration is frustrating, since it impedes reading of individual section titles on a mobile device. Getting from point A to point B, by means of anchoring (linking) 3 information segments through hyperlinks, in a 'table-of-contents' style, may be a solution to this problem (Chakrabarti, Dom, and Indyk 1998).Additionally...