Labs/Design-Challenge/Uni-Fall09

Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Uni Fall '09

Links and Precedents

• Useful Add-on | Link
• Integrating back, history and bookmarks in web browsers | PDF
• Scott Berkun blog post, How to Build a Better Web Browser (2004) | Link
• Tabviz post on user interviews/behaviors | Link
• Finding pages from browser history article | Link
• Eytan Adar paper on browsing history | Link
• Firefox add-ons relating to history | Link
• SF MoMA site
• MIT's SA+P Faculty site
• Newsmap
• The Whale Hunt by Jonathan Harris
• NYC MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit
• MIT EyeBrowse
• reMap
• Visualizing and Analyzing Web Browser History Data (2001)

Desires

• Speed, get what I want fast
• Save current state
• Prioritize
• organized history
• simple interface
• share cool things
• retrace my steps
• fuzzy search (interpret dreams)
• I want to see what the NYTimes website looked like last Wednesday morning
• see my browsing trends (inc'l most visited)
• Better integrated history in browser, FLUID
• More specific, meaningful, and EASY bookmarking
• I want to search my history by topic
• I want to share my history
• I want to mark parts of history that are important
• I want to visualize my usage patterns

Obstacles

• memory
• not right info
• i'm lost
• the content on the site has changed
• i'm confused
• time
• too much info
• i'm lazy
• Add to but rarely use links from Delicious
• Lack of instant access to history, Currently have to access through menus & has New Window
• Losing history page (gets lost among all windows)
• Keyword search isn't broad enough
• Browser crashing
• Wifi browser authentication
• I don't know how to
• I'm concerned about privacy
• Existing ones suck
• No mechanism to do it

User Stories

"I often remember what a page looked like, something about its composition and color. I'm usually diligent with marking sites I'm interested in with Delicious, but I very rarely check them later on or even bother to mark them until I do a mass 'tab close'. Plus, tags don't help me in this situation. I wish I had something that could use my 'fuzzy' recollection of a page to find it again." Mikejedw

"Even though I often bookmark the websites that I feel interested in, I usually don't use the bookmark because I  don't categorize it that much. I use the history from the location field by typing a few words, however in this case it is not easy to find specific page which I really want to visit again and I have to navigate from some of the page again. In this case we can't use forward button to re-generate (revive) the path that I have been through, which if possible, might be helpful for tracing and find the destination more easily." cre8ive

"I use tabbed browsing because I often find multiple links I'm interested in on a page. I tend to jump around a lot when I'm surfing or looking for something. I'll then keep those tabs open, read them and then close them when I'm done. But then if I want to go back to that tab, I can never figure out what path I took to get there. I know there's the 'Recently Closed Tabs' in the Bookmark dropdown, but I find that it's not organized well and I can't find that 1 article that I was really looking for, so I have to open them all up again which is annoying, and then search through them again. I wish there was a way to tag the article I was interested in, so my 'Recently Closed Tabs' section would remember that." aarondruck

Ideas

• spotlight for history
• use color
• stars *
• retool google maps --> history map
• tagging system
• customize/personalize page titles that appear in the awesome bar or history
• Hover state for fluid way to see visual image then descriptive data (timestamp, page name, domain)
• Timeline AND path based browsing of history
• Keyboard Shortcut! (for instant access to history and going through pages)
• measure scroll position vs. site time
• Storing the keywords from the content text. (manually or automatically) right-click? select text? select, CTRL-C?
• better search algorithm for history
• themed windows for browsing & search
• suggest sites you might be interested in
• bookmarks + history = :)
• Cache webpage locally
• Look for a cache at that page on the web.
• overlapping and/or anchored window. more quick popup?
• Allow user to attach their own semantics to their history
• Be able to target what you are searching (keywork, title, url)
• Create an iTunes model for sharing histories
• Share locally via something like Bonjour
• Bookmarking the time
• Recording start/stop function
• Integrate with personal calendar events
• custom ranking of bookmarks
• Design ones built around more specific & useful info
• Coverflow history browsing mode on Safari
• Google Search History Browser | Link
• Google Reader Link[1] (can record how long you are on the article and it means you are interested in that article)