MyWebSteps: Aiding Revisiting with a Visual Web History

Abstract

This research addresses the general topic of "keeping found things found" by investigating difficulties people encounter when revisiting webpages, and designing and evaluating a novel tool that addresses those difficulties. The research focused on occasional revisits -webpages that people have previously visited on only one day, a week or more ago (i.e., neither frequently nor recently). A three-month logging study was combined with a laboratory experiment to identify ten underlying causes of participants' revisiting failure. Overall, 61% of the failures occurred when a webpage had originally been accessed via search results, was on a topic a participant often looked at, or was on a known but large website. Then we designed a novel visual Web history tool to address the causes of failure and implemented it as a Firefox add-on. The tool was evaluated in a three-month field study, helped participants succeed on 96% of revisits, and was also used by some participants to review and reminisce about their "travels" online. Revised versions of the tool have been publicly released as the Firefox add-on MyWebSteps. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS• Identifying the underlying causes of failure when people revisit webpages.• Providing evidence how MyWebSteps helped users overcome those causes.

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

“…Revisitation in digital contexts involves a variety of activities, including returning to a particular website [2,8,18,25,42,95], re-accessing or modifying information in a document [82], switching between opened windows or tabs in a browser [50], scrubbing the timeline of video player to find previously-watched scenes [49], or re-selecting a menu item [83].…”

“…Five participants (two females), ages (24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31), from the University of Saskatchewan volunteered for this study. The study lasted 90 minutes on average for each participant.…”

Semantic History: Ontology-Based Modeling of Users’ Web Browsing Behaviors for Improved Web Page Revisitation

“…With the exponential growth of the Web, retrieving and refining relevant resources has become challenging [1,2] even for experienced users and using sophisticated search engine technologies. After finding relevant resources, additional efforts are required to remember their URLs (so that they may be revisited if needed), which is not feasible especially when the visited web pages are too many.…”

“…To handle his problem, a web browser contains several built-in tools, extensions, add-ons, etc. Also, several thirdparty applications including Google Toolbar 1 , back & forward buttons, URL autocompletion, bookmarks, etc., are available for improving web page revisitation [3]. Moreover, several notable add-ons including WebMynd 2 , Delicious 3 , Hooeey 4 , etc.…”

“…Users also use search engines [5], and their memory for finding and returning to web-based information [6]. The state-of-the-art literature contains several latest history-based revisitation solutions including MyWebSteps [1] and dynamic bookmarks [6].…”