Evaluating navigational surrogate formats with divergent browsing tasks

Navigational surrogates are representations that stand for information resources within search engine result sets, e?commerce sites, and digital libraries. They also form the basis of personal collections of media, such as web pages. Our hypothesis is that the formats of individual surrogates and collections play an important role in how people use collections. We are particularly interested in processes of information discovery, in which ideas are iteratively reformulated in the context of working with information.To investigate how the representation of navigational surrogates affects how people work with information, we have created a collection of undergraduate psychology curriculum resources in 3 alternative formats: a linear list of textual elements, a spatialized set of textual elements, and a spatialized set of labeled images that have been composited. To evaluate navigation with these surrogate formats during information discovery, we designed divergent browsing tasks, that is, tasks that require assembling information from multiple diverse sources. A within-subjects evaluation indicates that users prefer the spatial labeled images format, and navigate more effectively with it.