TY - JOUR T1 - An exploratory evaluation of three interfaces for browsing large hierarchical tables of contents JF - ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. Y1 - 1994 A1 - Chimera,Richard A1 - Shneiderman, Ben KW - Browsing KW - hierarchies KW - table of contents KW - User interfaces AB - Three different interfaces were used to browse a large (1296 items) table of contents. A fully expanded stable interface, expand/contract interface, and multipane interface were studied in a between-groups experiment with 41 novice participants. Nine timed fact retrieval tasks were performed; each task is analyzed and discussed separately. We found that both the expand/contract and multipane interfaces produced significantly faster times than the stable interface for many tasks using this large hierarchy; other advantages of the expand/contract and multipane interfaces over the stable interface are discussed. The animation characteristics of the expand/contract interface appear to play a major role. Refinements to the multipane and expand/contract interfaces are suggested. A predictive model for measuring navigation effort of each interface is presented. VL - 12 SN - 1046-8188 UR - http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/185462.185483 CP - 4 M3 - 10.1145/185462.185483 ER -