An assessment of email and spontaneous dialog visualizations

Marcus A. Butavicius, Michael D. Lee, Brandon M. Pincombe, Louise G. Mullen, Daniel J. Navarro, Kathryn M. Parsons, Agata McCormac
2012 International Journal of Human-Computer Studies  
Two experiments were conducted examining the effectiveness of visualizations of unstructured texts that consisted of transcriptions of unrehearsed dialogue and emails respectively. In general, the findings of both studies were similar to those of Butavicius and Lee's (2007) experiment which used highly structured news articles; namely, an advantage in semantically structured two-dimensional (2D) spatial layouts such as MDS (multidimensional scaling) over structured and non-structured list
more » ... ys. The second study also demonstrated that this advantage is not simply due to the 2D nature of the display but the combination of 2D display and the semantic structure underpinning it. Without this structure, performance fell to that of a random list of documents. The effect of document type in this study and in Butavicius and Lee (2007) may be partly described by a change in bias on a speed-accuracy trade-off. At one extreme, users were accurate but slow in answering questions based on the dialogue texts while, at the other extreme, users were fast but relatively inaccurate when responding to queries about emails. Similarly, users could respond accurately using the non-structured list interface; however this was at the cost of very long response times and was associated with a technique whereby participants navigate by clicking on neighboring document representations. Implications of these findings for real-world applications are discussed.
doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2012.02.002 fatcat:2sf2nmnoznatfljdypuky7v2va