The CircleSegmentView: a visualization for query preview and visual filtering

Users of Information Retrieval systems have often been the target group of Human-Computer Interaction researchers. A lot of effort has been spent inventing new forms of visualizations to support the information seeking process. Information Retrieval and Information Visualization are tight coupled fields of research. Together with psychology (which answers questions like ’how’ do users search) and usability engineering (answering questions like ’what’ do user expect from user interfaces and their behaviour) the research on improving information seeking systems goes on. This paper will concentrate on a meta-data driven, user-centered approach for the query formulation stage. In contrast to the intense research on result-set visualizations we will focus on the development of a visualization which supports human search behaviour at the query stage. Additionally this visualization proved that it can compete with other visualizations like the scatter-plot as a visual filter in the result-set presentation.