Snapboard: A shared space of visual snippets - A study in individual and asynchronous collaborative web search

Abstract

People often engage in many search tasks that be collaborative, where two or more individuals work together with the joint information needs. We introduced and built CoZpace, a web-based application that enables a group of users to collaborate on searching the web. We also presented the main feature of CoZpace, named Snapboard, which is a shared board for a collection of group-created visual snippets. The visual snippet is a snapshot of focused and salient information captured by a user. It acts as a visual summarization of web pages, which allows any user to quickly recognize information and to revisit web pages. This paper describes example usage scenarios and initially investigates the ways Snapboard facilitates users in individual and asynchronous collaborative search. We then analyze users’ interactions and discuss how Snapboard supports search collaboration among study participants.