Navigation Design Of Semantically-related Information Space For Decision-making

In information spaces,users need to “jump” between multiple pages or displays to forage useful decision cues.During this process,users are required to plan their exploration route alongside their exploration and integrate cues in the mental space to gain in-depth understanding of the overall structure and details of each single information node.This process is similar to what we called “wayfinding” in the real world.However,the structural complexity of information space and user cognitive bottleneck impedes the process of wayfinding and decision-making in the virtual information space.It taxes users' working memory to forage and browse cues,compare and integrate them to develop intact spatial awareness when transiting across information structures and displays.Frequent page jumps make users prone to loss of direction and position in information spaces,which is called disorientation.Disorientation stems from insufficient knowledge about their current position and incomplete understanding of relationship between the current nodes and other information nodes.In this study,we aims to mitigate the disorientation effect in semantically-related information space.A semantically-related scene visualization based on Overview+Detail is proposed from the perspective of user's perception bottleneck,cognitive ability and reducing loss.Through the visual representation,the information relationship in the information space is externalized,which can help users reduce the cognitive complexity of the information space,build cognitive map,avoid getting lost,and enhance the efficiency of information browsing and knowledge acquisition.It is also one of the important research directions in decision support to visualize the relationship between information elements.The main research contents of this paper include:(1)Mechanism of disorientation and its impact on decision-making are investigated,which shows that the reasonable and effective navigation design plays an important role in solving the mismatch between the information space and the cognitive space,and reducing disorientation.And based on the impact of disorientation on decision-making,we explore the feasibility of spatial navigation design in mitigating disorientation,which shows that context,information clues and recommendation services can alleviate loss in the information space.(2)The method of survey and process analysis is used to explore the user's cognitive process in exploratory search tasks under the semantically-related information space based on CNKI.It aims to analyze the user's navigation strategy and the search preferences,and to analyze the specific manifestations of disorientation.The experimental research shows that there is a mismatch between the navigation design and the user's navigation requirements,which makes the degree of loss increase with the deepening of information exploration.The optimization of navigation design can be carried out by externalizing and visualizing the semantic relationship between information nodes to ensure that users build mental models,which is also an important way to reduce the probability of disorientation and provide decision assistance.(3)Based on the design example of CNKI information space,a semantically-related scene visualization based on Overview+Detail is proposed to prompt users to search for retrieval words,optimize search results,visualize the relationship between information elements to improve the decision-making quality and information acquisition efficiency.And a case of semantically-related scene visualization based on Overview+Detail is developed.And an experiment is designed to verify the effectiveness of scene visualization to reduce lost,support users to make decisions and improve the efficiency of information acquisition.