Figure 1. Highlight case. Clicking or right-clicking on an item highlights all instances within the tree. This method presents results in a visually clean way while still communicating the relative location of items within the file structure. A user might choose this method where it is more important to get a sense of how many items there are without needing exact numbers or the increased relative location provided by a line link. (shown below).
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When searching a tree view, results are typically shown in a either a secondary window or in the right hand pane of the user interface. This behavior forces the user to move back and forth between windows or panes to understand the relationships of the resulting items and their relative paths and importance to each other. It also requires the user to maintain these relationships in (human) memory. Users would prefer to see the results somehow integrated into the tree itself to preserve their context.
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This invention adds several visual dimensions to the tree view that allow users to find multiple instances of an item within the tree structure itself. Approaches to solving this include:
- Allowing the user to click on an item within the tree thereby automatically expanding the tree to show all instances of that item, highlighting search results in the tree.
- Showing a pop-up menu to search for the next item with the number of results, and a menu item to find the next item.
- Providing connecting lines between items within the tree thus solving the fundamental problem of allowing users to view all items in relation to each other in the structure.
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Our preliminary study data suggest that users are faster and more accurate performing certain search tasks using this method, and prefer it over other methods.
Searching and displaying hierarchical information bases using an enhanced treeview
IBM Inventors
Shannon Matthew Farrington - SWG Information Management, User Experience Manager - Information Platform Solutions
Tracy Hutcheson - SWG Information Management User Experience Architecture and Strategy User Experience Professional
Wei Zhou - Usability Engineer