Improving revisitation in long documents with two-level artificial-landmark scrollbars

Abstract

In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis.

Investigating the Effects of Computer-Generated Contextual Landmarks on Short-Term Recall of E-Texts

“…Although, to the best of our knowledge, no one has attempted to study the effects of such treatments on content recall before, there is plentiful evidence that distinctive landmarks of this kind can substantially improve the capacity for users to find previously read passages of electronic texts (Piolat et al, 1997, Czerwinski et al, 1999Uddin et al, 2017;Mollashahi et al, 2018), implying that visual landmarks do have some impact on at least navigational recall. This may be because, as a species, we have evolved to navigate and remember features of the physical world using the shapes and patterns around us, including their visual relationships with one another.…”

Search Interface Design and Evaluation

“…The results from field experiments reveal that overviews support both pattern matching and revisitation, and the user interface is particularly useful for finding previously visited pages. To build spatial memory of long documents, Mollashahi et al (2018) proposed user interfaces with augmented scrollbars that use visual items as landmarks to support revisitation in long documents. The findings show that double-icons and two-level augmented scrollbars using icons lead to better search performance and score high on user preferences.…”