The effects of semantic grouping on visual search

Abstract

This paper reports on work-in-progress to better understand how users visually interact with hierarchically organized semantic information. Experimental reaction time and eye movement data are reported that give insight into strategies people employ while searching visual layouts containing words that are either grouped by category (i.e. semantically cohesive) or randomly grouped. Additionally, sometimes the category labels of the cohesive groups are displayed as part of the group. Preliminary results suggest that: (a) When groups are cohesive, people tend to search labeled and unlabeled layouts similarly. (b) People seem to trust the categorical information of labels more than non-labels. This work will be used to extend current computational models of visual search to better predict users visual interaction with interfaces.

Model of visual search and selection time in linear menus

“…In particular, semantic and alphabetic organizations of items are faster than unordered layouts [10,18,32,33]. This is explained by learning in visual search: experienced users learn to skip items in the menu.…”

“…The set of items was changed for each menu length. The set of words that we used is a subset of the list that can be found in [18] with minor modifications: no items in the menu have more than 3 letters length difference. This modification was used to reduce potential saliency effects.…”

“…The rest were solved using ordinary least squares (OLS), but insisting on theoretically sound value ranges. Note that we assume that both visual search strategies depend on menu organization: Unordered (U), Alphabetic (A), Semantic (S) [10,18,32,33]. The parameters of Eq.…”

Visual Grouping in Menu Interfaces

“…One important finding is that organizing the content of menus into semantically related groups helps users locate items faster [4]. This semantic grouping effect has been replicated numerous times [2,6], and examples of semantically arranged menus abound. For instance, Figure 1 shows two common menu interfaces (the Settings menu from Apple iPad and the File menu from Microsoft Word).…”

“…An extensive literature has sought to understand the factors that influence search time during menu interactions [2,3,4,6,7]. One important finding is that organizing the content of menus into semantically related groups helps users locate items faster [4].…”