Communicating Relatedness

Abstract: This report is an evaluation of if it is good or bad to use a metaphor in order to display the results of an academic search engine in a web interface. In order to evaluate this we are describing our work with developing two different web interfaces for an academic search engine by the name Silverfish. This project has been a co-operation between Indian Institute of Information Technol- ogy in Bangalore, India and Malmˆ University K3, Sweden. To start our report we describe how we see our context we are to work within. We define our stakeholders as being academics worldwide and also define that we are working within a web 2.0 context. To strengthen our choices regarding the design process of the two different interfaces as well as in order to give more validity to our discussion surrounding metaphors we continue with presenting different studies and facts that give more weight to the above mentioned parts. To make it possible to create the interfaces we have made use of several methods. We give a short definition of how these methods are to be used and later describe in the design process how we have made use of them. To describe how we have made use of the methods as well as to describe how we have developed our prototypes we continue our report with describing the design process, regarding which deci- sions we have made and why we have made them. To summarize our report we come to a con- clusion regarding our thesis question; communicating related key phrases through web interface metaphors; good or bad? Regarding our question we have found that the orientational metaphor we are using does not work as it is supposed to. We believe that further studies are required in order to get a deeper un- derstanding of how the user understands the orientational metaphor we are using. This informa- tion could help us come to an understanding of how we could make better use of our orienta- tional metaphor, or help us find out of a metaphor that would be better to use than our orienta- tional metaphor.