Visualizing activity traces to support collaborative literature searching

Following recent advances in visual interfaces for search, we investigate how to visualize activity traces to support collaborative information-seeking. We implemented a prototype system that visualizes traces of three types of activities (queries typed, articles bookmarked, and interested keywords) on top of a recent visual search system. The current interface of the system provides an interactive keyword visualization to support exploratory search. We designed two icons to visualize user interactions with the keywords and articles. We also implemented a time line to explicitly display the issued queries and additional details about the interactions. We conducted a longitudinal user study to evaluate the usability of these visualizations. We found that the visualization of traces of issued queries and bookmarked articles help the users to better monitor the progress of the collaborators, increase collaboration, and reassure their findings. Traces of interested keywords support sub-topic identification. Furthermore, activity traces of collaborators help the users to learn about the system features. The findings and the novel collaborative system provide valuable insights and tools into future research on designing interfaces for collaborative information-seeking.