Abstract
In a growing number of domains, users are presented with huge volumes of data that they are required to parse in order to accomplish their goals. Interface designers are experimenting with a variety of design manipulations to facilitate user's identification and analysis of these data. Many domains present information in grids, such as the side-by-side comparison of products prevalent at many e-commerce web sites. Further assistance can be provided by using color-coding, ranking systems and other visualization techniques. This study investigates the use of color-coding and ranking on tasks that require either focused or integrative analysis of tabular data. The results show that each provides some benefit, but color-coding is superior. The presence of both manipulations degrades performance, suggesting some degree of information overload. Furthermore, despite the prevalence of these techniques, instructions that explained how they were relevant to the task were necessary to achieve the performance improvement. The implications of these results are discussed.
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