Presenting search results of meeting documents

  • Authors:
  • Caslon Chua;Clinton Woodward

  • Affiliations:
  • Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia;Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 23rd Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Information plays an important role in organisations, allowing management to make sound decisions. Many organisations keep documents in electronic format, and as the number and volume of documents increases, search and retrieval become tedious and difficult. Effective presentation of search results is an important user interface issue for any search tool in this context. Search results can be composed of a number of different elements, including file details, text extracts and thumbnail images. This study considered the effectiveness of several search result presentation elements in the context of a desktop search tool used to search for relevant meeting minute documents. Participants were presented with search results from two existing desktop search applications and one test application developed by the authors. The participants were then asked to evaluate the quality of different elements of the result presentation. Responses indicated that domain-specific presentation elements are valuable to users, allowing them to effectively determine the relevance of individual search result items. The results also suggest that other domain specific search tools would benefit from customised search result presentation.