Background Information

In Peter Pirolli's book Exploring and Finding Information, he defines 'information scent' as "The user's use of environmental cues in judging information courses and navigating through information spaces."

In my experiment, for my 'scented search' condition I want to use what I will call "strong scent." I am defining this to include searching through lists organized by one of the five ways to organize information: category, time, location, alphabet and hierarchy (Universal Principles of Design or Information Anxiety). Of course, some of these are more strongly scented (alphabet or numeric) than others, such as category.

Additionally, I want my scented search interface to be what Jef Raskin defines as a "zooming interface paradigm (ZIP)" in The Humane Interface (pg 153). In fact, in chapter 6-2, he neatly describes the two types of interface I would like to test (I think).

The non-scented: He describes navigating through the interface like a maze--"I often find, deep in a submenu, a command or a check-box that solves a problem I am having...We are not good at remembering long sequences of turnings, which is why mazes make good puzzles and why present navigational schemes, used both within computers and on the web, often flummox the user." (152)

The scented: "The antithesis of a maze is a situation in which you can see your goal and the path to get there, one that preserves your sense of location while under way, making it equally easy to get back."