I’m delighted to report that our paper ‘Think outside the search box: A comparative study of visual and form-based query builders‘ has just been published in the Journal of Information Science. It’s been a long time in the making, primarily as the work involved an extensive set of empirical user studies and associated data analysis, for which much of the credit goes to my colleague and co-author Tanja Svarre. I am particularly pleased that this paper has made it into the public domain as it not only provides substance to the anecdotal evidence we’ve gathered around the value of visual approaches to advanced/systematic search, but also sets the scene for a follow-up paper focusing on a different demographic (with some quite unexpected differences between the two).
Feedback so far has been very informative, so keep it coming in. Abstract follows below:
Knowledge workers such as healthcare information professionals, legal researchers and librarians need to create and execute search strategies that are comprehensive, transparent and reproducible. The traditional solution is to use proprietary query-building tools provided by literature database vendors. In the majority of cases, these query builders are designed using a form-based paradigm that requires the user to enter keywords and ontology terms on a line-by-line basis and then combine them using Boolean operators. However, recent years have witnessed significant changes in human–computer interaction technologies, and users can now engage with online information systems using a variety of novel data visualisation techniques. In this article, we evaluate a new approach to query building in which users express concepts as objects on a visual canvas and compare this with a traditional form-based query builder in a laboratory-based user study. The results demonstrate the potential of visual interfaces to mitigate some of the shortcomings associated with form-based interfaces and encourage more exploratory search behaviour. They also demonstrate the value of having a temporary ‘scratch’ space in query formulation. In addition, the findings highlight an ongoing need for transparency and reproducibility in professional search and raise further questions about how these properties may best be supported.
Read full article.
Information Interaction 
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