History Deck: A Web Browser History Visualization Inspired by Storytelling and Comic Art

Browser history supports users reflecting upon their past, proceeding in decision making and revisiting web pages seen before while browsing the Web. However current implementations fail to provide a proficient solution for the users’ need. An approach for improving the visualization of the browser history is described in this paper by drawing an analogy between hypertext and storytelling. Therefore criteria for structuring of the visualization and characteristics of comic art as a genre of graphical storytelling can be applied. Since the user is considered as the narrator of the story, through his actions performed while browsing, the history is constructed automatically next to the context of his current work. The concept was implemented as a browser add-on named History Deck.