Do users appreciate novel interface features for literature search?

Faced with the challenges to design an easy-to-use, immediately comprehensible and powerful expert-user interface to search very large document collections in the life sciences, we developed several system prototypes. Their main features were faceting of the domain vocabulary for browsing and searching, flexible search-state-dependent drilling of the terminological hierarchy, dynamic query term auto-completions, and highlighting of matched terms (including synonyms and spelling variants). Under lab conditions we then evaluated these features in several task-based scenarios using camera recordings, thinking-aloud protocols and questionnaires. The results reveal that faceting and highlighting were very well received, while auto-completions seemed less important or were misconceptualized as spelling aids.