The Importance of Conveying Inter-Facet Relationships for Making Sense of Unfamiliar Domains

The design of online retail environments has improved significantly by including features such as faceted navigation, which provide meta-data to users as a means to apply constraints over the available products. The position held in this paper, and supported by a growing body of evidence, is that the specific implementation of such faceted experiences can increase the support for more exploratory searches and sensemaking in unfamiliar domains of information. The challenge remains, however, to understand exactly what aspects of the browsers support sensemaking and how. We conclude that the powerful models of information seeking used in recent research can be combined with sensemaking models to understand more about what interface elements support users as they progress in their knowledge acquisition during sensemaking and more exploratory tasks.