Toward the Design of a Collaborative Browsing Interface

Existing efforts on query interface design focus on single user and result in isolated information seeking process. In this research, we propose to design a collaborative browsing interface in which human users can easily retrieve information and identify people who have similar interests to ask for help, thereby enabling collaborative exploration on complex information space. In this paper, we present the issues and approaches of designing a collaborative browsing interface. Preliminary implementation experiences are also presented and discussed These results provide system designers with guidelines of constructing query interfaces and demonstrate how query interfaces influence the performance of decision making.