Metadata
Title
Scented Widgets: Improving Navigation Cues with Embedded Visualizations
Category
general
UUID
a648cd0f40b54e178d50e9c0fd2f8972
Source URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers/scented-widgets
Parent URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers
Crawl Time
2026-03-11T03:09:58+00:00
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Scented Widgets: Improving Navigation Cues with Embedded Visualizations

Source: https://idl.uw.edu/papers/scented-widgets Parent: https://idl.uw.edu/papers

Wesley Willett, Jeffrey Heer, Maneesh Agrawala. IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2007

Wesley Willett, Jeffrey Heer, Maneesh Agrawala

IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis), 2007

Widgets with visual information scent cues. Left: Radio buttons with comment counts. Right: Histogram slider with data totals.

Materials

PDF

Abstract

This paper presents scented widgets, graphical user interface controls enhanced with embedded visualizations that facilitate navigation in information spaces. We describe design guidelines for adding visual cues to common user interface widgets such as radio buttons, sliders, and combo boxes and contribute a general software framework for applying scented widgets within applications with minimal modifications to existing source code. We provide a number of example applications and describe a controlled experiment which finds that users exploring unfamiliar data make up to twice as many unique discoveries using widgets imbued with social navigation data. However, these differences equalize as familiarity with the data increases.

BibTeX

@article{2007-scented-widgets,
  title = {Scented Widgets: Improving Navigation Cues with Embedded Visualizations},
  author = {Willett, Wesley AND Heer, Jeffrey AND Agrawala, Maneesh},
  journal = {IEEE Trans. Visualization \& Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis)},
  year = {2007},
  volume = {13},
  number = {6},
  pages = {1129--1136},
  url = {https://idl.uw.edu/papers/scented-widgets},
  doi = {10.1109/TVCG.2007.70589}
}

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