Image Representations for Accessing and Organizing Web Information

The web is enormous and constantly growing. User-interfaces for web-based applications need to make it easy for people to access relevant information without becoming overwhelmed or disoriented. Today’s interfaces employ textual representations almost exclusively, typically organized in lists and hierarchies of web-page titles or URL taxonomies. Given the ability of images to assist memory and our frequent exploitation of space in everyday problem solving to simplify choice, perception, and mental computation, it is surprising that so little use is made of images and spatial organizations in accessing and organizing web information. The work we summarize in this paper suggests that spatial and temporal organization of selectable images may offer multiple advantages over textual lists of titles and URLs. We describe several image-based applications, detail basic image representation techniques, and discuss spatial and temporal strategies for organization.