As a final attempt to understand the exploration strategies used by the participants of the Visual Information Retrieval experiment we decided to try to map their jumps on the map in relation to the available possibilities calling this a “relative distance”. For instance, if two consecutive documents in the jump sequence were the absolute closest this would have produced a relative distance of 1.

On the contrary all the other documents which would have been at a shorter distance to the starting one, would count as more units on this relative distance.

This is a trick to understand to what extent the user tried to explore the nodes which were closer to the selected one, or, in other words, we wanted to understand whether the jumps distance was a function of the document pertinence.

The picture below represent a small excerpt of the results of this analysis. The last column tell use whether the user was reading a correct answer to the task.