HCIL-2009-27

There are many search and browsing tasks online where relevance scores are not particularly important to the user, but other scores like popularity or average rating can be very informative. If and how these scores are shown varies widely between systems. In this paper, we investigate dierent methods for visualizing these scores and how they aect user behavior. We conducted a con- trolled study with 21 subjects who each completed tasks with six dierent visualization methods. We found that there was no signicant dierence between the meth- ods with respect to their impact on the user interaction with search results, but that there was a strong prefer- ence for having some sort of visualization. We discuss the experiment, results, and design implications that follow from this work.