Web History Tools and Revisitation Support: A Survey of Existing Approaches and Directions (original) (raw)

IMPROVING WEB PAGE REVISITATION: ANALYSIS, DESIGN, AND EVALUATION

In this paper, we distill several years of our research on understanding and improving how people return to their previously visited web pages. Our motivation is that web page revisitation is one of the most frequent actions in computer use, and consequently any interface improvements in this area-no matter how small-can have a very large effect. We report our findings across five categories of revisitation research: characterisations of user behaviour; system models of navigation and their impact on the user's understanding; interface methods for increasing the efficiency of the Back button; alternative system models for navigation; and alternative methods for presenting web navigation histories. The behaviour characterisation shows that revisitation is a dominant activity, with an average of four out of five page visits being to previously seen pages. It also shows that the Back button is heavily used, but poorly understood. Three interface strategies for improving web page revisitation are described. The first, a gesture-based mechanism for issuing the frequent Back and Forward commands, addresses low-level interface issues, and is shown to be both popular and effective. The second, a 'temporal' behaviour for the Back and Forward buttons, aims to overcome the problems associated with poor understanding of the current behaviour of Back. Although the results do not conclusively show advantages for the temporal behaviour of Back, they strongly suggest that revisitation can be improved by providing temporally ordered lists of previously visited pages. The third interface scheme investigates how next-generation browsers could integrate the current tools for revisitation into a single utility, and how simple visualisation methods can be used to aid users in identifying target pages displayed in miniature.

Web page revisitation revisited

Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems - CHI '07, 2007

This paper presents results of an extensive long-term clickstream study of Web browser usage. Focusing on character and challenges of page revisitation, previous findings from seven to thirteen years ago are updated. The term page revisit had to be differentiated, since the recurrence rate-the key measure for the share of page revisits-turns out to strongly depend on interpretation. We identify different types of revisitation that allow assessing the quality of current user support and developing concepts for new tools.

How people revisit web pages: empirical findings and implications for the design of history systems

1997

We report on users' revisitation patterns to World Wide Web (web) pages, and use the results to lay an empirical foundation for the design of history mechanisms in web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analysed 6 weeks of detailed usage data collected from 23 users of a wellknown web browser.

Characterizations of user Web revisit behavior

2005

In this article we update and extend on earlier long-term studies on user's page revisit behavior. Revisits are very common in web navigation, but not as predominant as reported in earlier studies. Backtracking is the most common type of page revisitation and is both used for finding new information and relocating information visited before. Search engines are mainly used for finding new information and users frequently backtrack to result pages. Visits to pages already visited in earlier sessions tend to occur in chunks, but it is not straightforward to create a list of most likely pages that will be revisited. We conclude with a short discussion on design implications for useradaptive revisitation support.

WebView: A graphical aid for revisiting Web pages

1999

Abstract 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.

Web page revisitation revisited: implications of a long-term click-stream study of browser usage

Proceedings of the …, 2007

This paper presents results of an extensive long-term clickstream study of Web browser usage. Focusing on character and challenges of page revisitation, previous findings from seven to thirteen years ago are updated. The term page revisit had to be differentiated, since the recurrence rate-the key measure for the share of page revisits-turns out to strongly depend on interpretation. We identify different types of revisitation that allow assessing the quality of current user support and developing concepts for new tools.

Semantic History Map: Graphs Aiding Web Revisitation Support

2010

Abstract We present a novel approach intended to reduce user effort required to retrieve and/or revisit previously discovered information by exploiting web search and navigation history. In our approach, we collect streams of user actions during search and navigation sessions, identify individual user goals and construct and persistently store visual trees representing session history.

Issues of page representation and organisation in web browser's revisitation tools

2007

Abstract Many commercial and research WWW browsers include a variety of graphical revisitation tools that let users return to previously seen pages. Examples include history lists, bookmarks and site maps. In this paper, we examine two fundamental design and usability issues that all graphical tools for revisitation must address. First, how can individual pages be represented to best support page identification?

Using page histories for improving browsing the web

2008

Currently, users generally do not have much temporal support when browsing Web pages. The Web is in fact a transitive collection where little effort is made for enabling access to historical content of pages. However, integrating documents with their histories should bring many benefits such as facilitated judgment of documents' trustworthiness or time travel. In this paper we present several interaction methods that users could have with page histories. We also demonstrate example systems designed for realizing these interaction types and discuss related issues.

Patterns of revisitation in world wide web navigation

1996

In this paper, we report user's revisitation patterns to World Wide Web (WWW) pages, and use the results to lay an empirical foundation towards the design of history mechanisms in Web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, ostensibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analyzed 6 weeks of detailed usage data collected from 23 users of a commercial web browser. We found that 58% of an individual's pages are revisits, and that users continually add new Web pages into their repertoire of visited pages. People tend to revisit pages just visited, access only a few pages frequently, browse in very small clusters of related pages, and generate only short sequences of repeated URL paths. We compared different history presentation styles, and found that the stack-based prediction method prevalent in commercial browsers is poorer than the simpler approach of showing the last few recently visited URLs with duplicates removed. Other predictive approaches fare even better. It is clear that today's browsers are not as effective as they could be.