From hyperlinks to hypercues: Entity-based affordances for fluid information exploration

We introduce the concept of hypercue, a complement to hyperlinks in the form of an interactive representation of real-world entities (e.g., persons, places, concepts) providing personalized access points to information. Hypercues create opportunities to flexibly discover, store, and share information; organize one's thoughts; and gain insights from the data. We explore the design space of interaction techniques supporting entity-based information exploration by reviewing recent examples of such work. We reflect on these through the lens of eight essential features of exploratory search systems to devise generalizable design principles. Our main contribution is a design template describing the hypercue, which consists of a minimal set of affordances that ensure all important features for supporting exploratory search can be addressed while leaving enough design space to facilitate integration with a variety of systems. Finally, we describe the rationale behind the design template and discuss its implications.