A Tour Through the Zoo of Scented Widgets

Abstract

Software developers can choose among many popular widget toolkits to build graphical user interfaces quickly. Widgets like sliders, buttons and scrollbars are widespread and well-understood by the public. They allow users to interact with the software, to trigger operations or to set parameters. It is also recognized that widgets could be enhanced to provide a better user experience. Embedded visualizations, also known as scents, could be added to standard widgets to enhance their capabilities. In this work, we survey the literature concerning scented widgets. We propose a two-level taxonomy structured around four main dimensions: Purpose, Widget Type, Number of Scents and Scent Type, with examples of scented widgets. We also discuss our current thoughts about the scope of this survey, and call for feedback to further improve and extend the proposed taxonomy.