This paper offers new principles for visual information seeking (VIS). A key concept is to support browsing, which is distinguished from familiar query composition and information retrieval because of its emphasis on rapid filtering to reduce result sets, progressive refinement of search parameters, continuous reformulation of goals, and visual scanning to identify results. VIS principles developed include: dynamic query filters (query parameters are rapidly adjusted with sliders, buttons, maps, etc.), starfield displays (two-dimensional scatterplots to structure result sets and zooming to reduce clutter), and tight coupling (interrelating query components to preserve display invariants and support progressive refinement combined with an emphasis on using search output to foster search input). A FilmFinder prototype using a movie database demonstrates these principles in a VIS environment.

This article summarizes the historical development of major advances in humancomputer interaction technology, emphasizing the pivotal role of university research in the advancement of the field.

A user interface software tool helps developers design and implement the user interface. Research on past tools has had enormous impact on today's developers---virtually all applications today were built using some form of user interface tool. In this paper, we consider cases of both success and failure in past user interface tools. From these cases we extract a set of themes which can serve as lessons for future work. Using these themes, past tools can be characterized by what aspects of the user interface they addressed, their threshold and ceiling, what path of least resistance they offer, how predictable they are to use, and whether they addressed a target that became irrelevant. We believe the lessons of these past themes are particularly important now, because increasingly rapid technological changes are likely to significantly change user interfaces. We are at the dawn of an era where user interfaces are about to break out of the "desktop" box where they have been stuck for the ...

This article is extracted and adapted from Ben Shneiderman's newly revised and recently published book, Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human---Computer Interaction (Third Edition), Addison Wesley Longman, Copyright 1998, with the permission of the publisher.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the study of how people design, implement, and use interactive computer systems and how computers affect individuals, organizations, and society. This encompasses not only ease of use but also new interaction techniques for supporting user tasks, providing better access to information, and creating more powerful forms of communication. It involves input and output devices and the interaction techniques that use them; how information is presented and requested; how the computer’s actions are controlled and monitored; all forms of help, documentation, and training; the tools used to design, build, test, and evaluate user interfaces; and the processes that developers follow when creating interfaces. This report describes the historical and intellectual foundations of HCI and then summarizes selected strategic directions in human-computer interaction research. Previous important reports on HCI directions include the results of the

: This chapter offers recommendations for potential authors of hypertext documents based on the experience of designing a hypertext system and of creating a series of substantial hypertext databases on personal computers and larger workstations. Advice on choosing projects, identifying useful author tool features, and structuring knowledge is presented. Additional issues such as the design of the root document, article size, and conversion from existing databases are covered. While hypertext has exciting potentials, the dangers of poor design must be overcome to create attractive and effective products. This report appeared in Barrett, Ed (Editor), The Society of Text, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, (1989). Ben Shneiderman is a Professor of Computer Science, Head of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and a Member of the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, all at the University of Maryland, College Park. 2 Reflections on Authoring, Editing, and Managin...

The goal of this research is to provide hypermedia functionality to all information systems. In this paper I present the architecture of a system-level hypermedia engine, designed both to manage fill hypermedia finc-tionality for an information system and to bind intelface-oriented 'Ifront-end " systems with separate computation-oriented "back-end "systems. The engine dynamically su-perimposes a hypermedia representation over a back-end application's knowledge components and processes. I then describe a set of minimal requirements for integrating the hypermedia engine. The more sophisticated and coop-erative the information system, the higher the level of hy-permedia support the engine will provide. 1: Hypermedia and information systems

The need to analyze and query spatial data is becoming increasingly important with the advent of applications such as Geographic Information Systems, Image Databases and Remote Sensing. The focus of our research is to support spatial data analysis by developing a direct manipulation environment to visually query as well as browse spatial data and to review the visual results for trend analysis. In this paper, we present a visual query language (SVIQUEL) which allows us to specify the relative spatial position (both topology and direction) between objects using direct manipulation. This query language builds upon the notion of dynamic query filters and significantly extends them to support integrated querying of both topological and directional types of spatial data. In order to facilitate continuous querying as required by a direct manipulation environment, we designed an integrated neighborhood model for both kinds of spatial relationships (topology and direction). Our spatial query p...

Links are one of the most important means for navigation in the World Wide Web. However, the visualization of and the interaction with Web links have been scarcely explored, although Links have severe implications on the appearance and usability of Web pages and the World Wide Web as such.

This paper focuses on our extensions to the Tioga editor to support two very different styles of active documents. One paradigm involves dynamically computing, or at least transforming, the contents of a document as it is displayed. A second paradigm uses notifications of edits to a document to trigger activities. Document activities can include database queries, which are evaluated and placed in the document upon opening the document, or constraints between portions of a document, which are maintained as the user edits the document. The resulting active documents can be viewed, edited, filed, and mailed in the same way as regular documents, while retaining their activities.