Overview Scrollbar: A Scrollbar Showing an Entire Document as an Overview

Abstract

Abstract.A scrollbar is the most basic function of a graphical user interface. It is usually displayed on one side of an application window when a displayed document is larger than the window. However, the scrollbar is mostly presented as a simple bar without much information, and there is still plenty of room for improvement. In this paper, we propose an overview scrollbar that displays an overview of the entire document on it and implemented four types of overview scrollbars that use different compression methods to render the overviews. We conducted a user study to investigate how people use these scrollbars and measured the performance of them. Our results suggest that overview scrollbars are more usable than is a traditional scrollbar when people search targets that are recognizable in overview.

THC-DAT helps in reading a multi-topic document

“…A common tool was often selected as the baseline. For instance, Mizoguchi et al (2013) proposed four types of overview scrollbars and compared them with the traditional scrollbar. Wu et al (2012) examined two relevance feedback techniques in interactive multilingual information access (MLIA), and regarded a basic interactive MLIA search without any relevance feedback as a benchmark system.…”

“…When it comes to task design, tasks are often devised to satisfy test assumptions or research purposes. For example, Mizoguchi et al (2013) set all tasks to search and click objects on a vertically long document to investigate the performance of overview scrollbar. Whittaker et al (2010) attempted to test a new user interface (SCAN) in local browsing by comparing different retrieval situations with relevance ranking, fact-finding and summarization tasks.…”