How people recognize previously seen Web pages from titles, URLs and thumbnails

The selectable lists of pages offered by web browsers ’ history and bookmark facilities ostensibly make it easier for people to return to previously visited pages. These lists show the pages as abstractions, typically as truncated titles and URLs, and more rarely as small thumbnail images. Yet we have little knowledge of how recognizable these representations really are. Consequently, we carried out a study that compared the recognizability of thumbnails between various image sizes, and of titles and URLs between various string sizes. Our results quantify the tradeoff between the size of these representations and their recognizability. These findings directly contribute to how history and bookmark lists should be designed

ScreenTrack: Using a Visual History of a Computer Screen to Retrieve Documents and Web Pages

Computers are used for various purposes, so frequent context switching is inevitable. In this setting, retrieving the documents, files, and web pages that have been used for a task can be a challenge. While modern applications provide a history of recent documents for users to resume work, this is not sufficient to retrieve all the digital resources relevant to a given primary document. The histories currently available do not take into account the complex dependencies among resources across applications. To address this problem, we tested the idea of using a visual history of a computer screen to retrieve digital resources within a few days of their use through the development of ScreenTrack. ScreenTrack is software that captures screenshots of a computer at regular intervals. It then generates a time-lapse video from the captured screenshots and lets users retrieve a recently opened document or web page from a screenshot after recognizing the resource by its appearance. A controlled user study found that participants were able to retrieve requested information more quickly with ScreenTrack than under the baseline condition with existing tools. A follow-up study showed that the participants used ScreenTrack to retrieve previously used resources and to recover the context for task resumption.Comment: CHI 2020, 10 pages, 7 figure

Integrating back, history and bookmarks in web browsers

Bibliography: p. 97-98

INTEGRATING BACK, HISTORY AND BOOKMARKS IN WEB BROWSERS

Most Web browsers include Back, History and Bookmark facilities that simplify how people return to previously seen pages. While useful, these three facilities all operate on quite different underlying models, which undermines their usability. Our alternative revisitation system uses a single model of a recency-ordered history list to integrate Back, History and Bookmarks. Enhancements include: Back as a way to step through this list; implicit and explicit 'dog-ears' to mark pages on the list (replacing Bookmarks); searching/filtering the list through dynamic queries; and visual thumbnails to promote page recognition.We are currently acquiring citations for the work deposited into this collection. We recognize the distribution rights of this item may have been assigned to another entity, other than the author(s) of the work.If you can provide the citation for this work or you think you own the distribution rights to this work please contact the Institutional Repository Administrator at [email protected]

Contrasting Stack-Based and Recency-Based Back Buttons on Web Browsers

People frequently use the ubiquitous Back button found in most Web browsers to return to recently visited pages. Because all commercial browsers implement Back as a stack, previously visited branches of the tree are pruned. While this means that people can quickly navigate back up the tree, previously seen pages on alternate child branches are no longer reachable through Back. An alternate method implements Back on a recency model. Here, all visited pages are placed on a recency-ordered list with duplicates removed, which means that all previously seen pages are now reachable via Back. Because advantages and trade-offs exist in both methods, we performed a study that contrasted how people used stack vs recency-based Back. Surprising to us, several of our results were contrary to our expectations. First, people have a poor model of both stack and recency-Back. Second, people do not predict what pages will appear as they click Back. Rather, they use a ‘click until recognize ’ strategy, where they simply click Back until they recognize the desired page. Third, people show no strong preference of recency vs. stack-Back. Consequently, we advocate replacing stack-Back with recency-Back only if other browser design considerations warrant it. Key words: History system, browser design.

WebView: A Graphical Aid for Revisiting Web Pages

Current commercial web browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer provide a wide and diverse range of utilities, such as history lists and bookmarks, that support revisiting previously seen pages on the web. Yet previous research indicates that these utilities are largely unused. In this paper, we present an alternative utility called WebView; a prototype designed to improve the efficiency and usability of page revisitation. It does this by paying particular attention to how previous pages are represented visually, and by integrating many revisitation capabilities into a single display space. Our preliminary evaluation of WebView indicates that users are enthusiastic about the functionality provided, and that it improves the efficiency of some navigational acts