The Delegate Browser: Assessing the Usefulness of Rich-Prospect Browsing for Managing Social Capital Online

One approach to browsing and navigation of large collections of data is an online browser based on rich-prospect principles of showing some meaningful representation of every item in the collection and providing tools for manipulating the display (Ruecker, 2003). Past studies found such browsers to be effective for academics (Texttiles - a text collections explorer (Giacometti, 2009)), and seniors (a pill browser interface for seniors (Given, Sadler, Ruecker, & Gabriele, 2005)) in exploration and visualization tasks. Our four-person team created another type of a rich-prospect browser with the intention of helping delegates manage social capital at conferences.;This thesis suggests adjustments to a future iteration of the Delegate Browser in three areas: addition of specific elements to the user interface; changes to the programming of the application; and development of a rich-prospect browser to visualize log data collected from the Delegate Browser itself. This study builds on research in HCI's areas of development of new design methodologies, prototyping of new software systems, exploration of new paradigms for interaction, and development of models and theories of interaction.