Navigation and interaction within graphical bookmarks

This paper presents a new user interface called BookMap for WWW navigation tasks. This interface is an alternative to current browsing interfaces. The user’s bookmarks are represented in a graphical document called a BookMap. The BookMap is enriched with other web pages: (1) a short term history (the six last visited pages), (2) a personal “BestOf”, (the six most visited web pages), and (3)an area of unclassified web pages stored to defer reading. A BookMap is considered both a document and a user interface for browsing. In this paper, we first motivate our approach by reviewing previous analysis of web navigation problems and bookmarks usage. We then quickly recall the concept of document as user interfaces. Then we describe the BookMap user interface and discuss visualization, interaction and implementation issues. K EYW OR D S: B ookma rks , His tory, V is ua liz a tion, U se r inte rfa ce , W WW , N aviga tion, B row sing. INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATIONS Bookmarks are heavily used and have been shown to be a useful tool for hypertext navigation [1],[2],[3]. According to the 5 GVU survey [4], 92% of users have their own bookmark archive. Bookmarks reduce the cognitive load of browsing hypertext [5]. A recent analysis of bookmark files and interviews of users [1] exhibits many of the possible uses for bookmarks. According to this study, bookmarks are used: • to collect information from the web; • to defer reading; • to speed up access to information; • to remember previous sessions and resume tasks that were interrupted; • to indirectly add annotations to web sites (usually by authoring html files that contains collections of annotated bookmarks); • to create customized views of the web; • to share resources. Group of users working on the same project or subject often exchange bookmarks by email. Librarian or computer staff often provide bookmarks to help users find information on the web; This list of the possible uses of bookmarks is not exhaustive, but it shows the importance of bookmarks can be for many common web-related tasks. Another use of bookmarks is locating information. Even though search engines are the most common tool for locating information, they have limitations. For example, 45% of web users consider that locating information is still a problem in 1998[6], even though they regularly use search engines. Bookmarks can help solve this problem. Many users maintain bookmarks that can be accessed by other users. This informal collaboration among users aims at retrieving “high quality” information. The collaboration can be achieved either by sending bookmarks over e-mail or by making bookmarks accessible through the web. It can also be transmitted through more sophisticated systems often called recommendation systems such as Pharos [7] or others. An indirect benefit of bookmarks is speed since caching of web pages referenced in the bookmark can be done to speed-up the loading process. Most recent browsers provide this facility. Finally, one of the major advantages of bookmarks, and maybe the most substantial, is that they constitute a personal information space [1]: pages collected on the web are organized in a personal way. This feature of bookmarks is mostly important because organizing information on the Web is a difficult task. In 1996, 33.6% of users cited organizing information as a problem for the Web. This was the second most cited problem of the WWW at the time. In 1998, even though many other problems have emerged, organizing information was still cited to be a problem by 27.5% of users. While bookmarks are so used and so useful, the presentation and interaction with bookmarks is still very limited. Most browsers provide very few interaction and visualization features for bookmarks. Another motivation for our work is driven by results from web browsing analysis [8]: more than 50% of page visits are in fact page re-visits. Why keep browser centered user interfaces, where access to already visited pages is indirect? In summary, this work aims at (1) providing a better user interface to manage bookmarks with advanced visualization and interaction techniques and (2) using this bookmark user interface as a user interface for web browsing. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK Our work is based on previous work that we summarize here. Design recommandation for bookmarks In their analysis of bookmark usage, [1] make recommendations for the design of bookmark management systems. These recommendations fall into four categories: • O r ganiz ation of the book m ar ks (1) M inimiz e the effort ne e de d to organiz e bookma rks , (2) Fa cilitate the c rea tion of hie ra rc hie s, (3) provide imme dia te filling me c hanis m, (4) provide a utoma te d s orting c a pa bilitie s , (5) s upport the hierarchical organization during browsing sessions, (6) support usage pattern driven organization of bookmarks. • G lobal vis ualiz ation of bookm ar k s (7) V is ua liz e a large numbe r of bookmarks , (8)provide timeba se d vis ua liz a tions . • Indiv idual r epr e s entation of one book mar k Figure 1: BookMap main window (9) provide e a s y re na ming of a bookmark, (10) provide multiple re pre s e nta tions of a bookma rk. • Inte gr ation (11) bookmark management should fit well in the browser, (12) bookmarks should be shared among computers. In this paper we show how we took many of these recommendations into account in our work. Documents as user interfaces Our conceptual user interface model is based on previous work on active documents or documents as user interfaces ([9],[10],[11],[12],[13]). In our model, the interface for accessing and organizing bookmarks is considered a graphical document (a BookMap). A BookMap is made of several components, among which bookmark representations, categories, and interactors (filters, distortion controllers). One main advantage in using such a model is that the user interface inherits good properties from documents: it can be edited, saved, and shared among users or machines. PRESENTATION OF BOOKMAPS We define a BookMap as a graphical and interactive document that contains references to web pages, viewers and interactors. References to web pages include (1) bookmarks (also called favorites or items from hotlists), (2) references to recently visited web pages, (3) references to most visited web pages, (4) references to web pages that a user find interesting during navigation but decide to defer reading. These references can be organized as lists or hierarchies of categories that help organize them. Viewers are responsible for the display of these references. Viewers are in charge of the layout and also of the individual representation of web pages. Finally, interactors are in charge of direct or indirect manipulation of the references. These manipulations rinclude filters, distortion controllers (to implement zoom or fisheye transformation) or more common editing operation (move, copy, paste, etc.).