User Interface Design Patterns

Continuous Highlight

Continuous Highlight is a dynamic query with the following principles:

The user gives search criteria, and the system highlights the matches continuously. The non-hits are not filtered out.
The search criteria and the results are shown simultaneously.

Use Continuous Highlight, when the user needs context (non-matching items of the query) to accomplish his goal.

If the goal does not require comparison of the hits with the non-hits, Continuous Filter is more effective, because the hits are quicker to find among the results, and a lot of unnecessary scrolling can be avoided.

Example 1: Search with the Popout Prism browser

Example 2: Search on a hyperbolic tree

Example 3: Search on HishiMochi [Toyoda00]

References

[Toyoda00] Toyoda M., Shibayama E., HishiMochi: A Zooming Browser for Hierarchically Clustered Documents. CHI 2000 Extended Abstracts, ACM, New York, 2000.