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: