Get Inspired: A Visual Divide and Conquer Approach for Motive-based Search Scenarios

A novel generation of (e.g. touch-driven) applications leads to a new universe of interaction paradigms and a growing need for simple, inspiring and smart interfaces. A system intended for non-experts should only present information the user needs to solve his task, instead of confronting him with the large and complex underlying data structure. In this paper, we focus on users wanting to perform a product search driven by a vague information need. We call this kind of search motive-based search, which is often initiated by unconscious motives and expectations that are difficult to transform into a specific search query. Therefore, we developed a search approach, which allows a step-by-step reduction of the result set by selecting (visualized) concepts such as "beach", "relaxing" and "culture". Concepts are often organized as multiple faceted hierarchies and can also be used as navigation paradigm, named faceted search. We will present the significant flaws of this approach concerning larger knowledge bases. Alternatively, we propose a selection-based recommendation-driven search, based on the principle of divide and conquer. An experiment compares both approaches proving that the proposed approach allows to solve the given search tasks in shorter time and with less effort.