Organizing suggestions in autocompletion interfaces

We describe two user studies that investigate organization strategies of autocompletion in a known-item search task: searching for terms taken from a thesaurus. In Study 1, we explored ways of grouping term suggestions from two different thesauri (TGN and WordNet) and found that different thesauri may require different organization strategies. Users found Group organization more appropriate for location names from TGN, while Alphabetical works better for object names from WordNet. In Study 2, we compared three different organization strategies (Alphabetical, Group and Composite) for location name search tasks. The results indicate that for TGN autocompletion interfaces help improve the quality of keywords, Group and Composite organization help users search faster, and is perceived easier to understand and to use than Alphabetical. This research was supported by the MultimediaN project through the BSIK program and by the European Commission contract FP6-027026, K-Space