(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2013)
Chen, Jiajian; Xu, Yan; Turk, Greg; Stasko, John T.
Image browsing and searching are some of the most common tasks in daily computer use. Zooming techniques are important for image searching and browsing in a large collection of thumbnail images in a single screen. In this paper we investigate the design and usability of different zoom-in-context views for image browsing and searching. We present two new zoom-in-context views, sliding and expanding views, that can help users explore a large collection of images more efficiently and enjoyably. In the sliding view the zoomed image moves its neighbors away vertically and horizontally. In the expanding view, the nearby images are pushed away in all directions, and this method uses a Voronoi diagram to compute the positions of the neighbors. We also present the results of a user study that compared the usability of the two zoom-in-context views and an overlapping, non-context zoom in the tasks of searching to match an image or a text description, and the task of brochure making. Although the task completion times were not significantly different, users expressed a preference for the zoom-in-context methods over the standard non-context zoom for text-matching image search and for image browsing tasks.