Azam Majooni

The basic premise of this research is investigating the effect of layout on the comprehension and cognitive load of the viewers in the information graphics. The term ‘Layout’ refers to the arrangement and organization of the visual and textual elements in a graphical design. The experiment conducted in this study is designed based on two stories and each one of these stories is presented with two different layouts. During the experiment, eye-tracking devices are applied to collect the gaze data including the eye movement data and pupil diameter fluctuation. In the research on the modification of the layouts, contents of each story are narrated using identical visual and textual elements. The analysis of eye-tracking data provides quantitative evidence concerning the change of layout in each story and its effect on the comprehension of participants and variation of their cognitive load. In conclusion, it can be claimed that the comprehension from the zigzag form of the layout was higher with a less imposed cognitive load.

From more than half a century ago indexing scientific articles has been studied intensively to provide a more efficient data retrieval and to conserve researchers invaluable time. In the last two decades with the emergence of the World Wide Web and the rapid growth in the number of scientific documents online many academic databases and search engines were launched with almost similar structure in order to reduce the difficulty in finding, relating and sorting of the existing scientific documents published online. The dramatic increase of the scientific documents in the last few years makes it necessary that the retrieved information by the search engines be analyzed and more organized and interpretable representation be displayed to the users. Information visualization is a great way for exploration of large and complex data sets, therefore it can be a natural candidate for the purpose of generating more comprehensible search results for the citation and academic databases. In this survey the usage pattern of the participants and their demands and ideas for the existence of other beneficial methods for literature review has been questioned and the results are quantitatively analyzed.