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)
• Top 10 Ways Best Ways to Manage Firefox Tabs Link
• Lost bookmarks Link

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

"I prefer adding tabs to adding windows when opening pages. It's easier to navigate between the tabs because they are always locked at the top of browser window, and there are keyboard shortcut to tab through them. Windows tend to get lost and require more clicking/mousing around = more time. Even the keyboard shortcut for Windows is time consuming because you have to key through each one to read the title. However if I have too many tabs in one window I might start a new window, especially if I think I'll be opening lots of related tabs from a particular page.

One problem with tabs is when you right click on a link and 'open link in new tab' the link open in a new tab as though it's the start of a new browsing chain, you can't hit Back to see your path to that page. So if you close the original tab you can't get back to where you've been. It would be nice if you could 'open link in new tab' and the browsing history/path was transferred into that new tab." lbtran

"I find myself with multiple windows open, each containing dozens of tabs related to a certain topic or links from articles I've read in single session. I never close my browser because I don't want to lose the tabs. I wish there was a way to save windows of tabs to come back to later, or a way to save windows of tabs under different categories." and.bradshaw

"I was trying to show a useful tutorial to someone but I forgot the link. It wasn't good enough for my bookmarks and I visit about 100 sites a day. It would have been nice to tag the tutorial in my history as a tutorial and give it a star ranking. I think tagging and star ranking can get rid of the mess that bookmark organizing is entirely. I also have the problem of never wanting to close a useful tab because I know I will lose it. I sometimes put off shutting down my system just because I want that one site open and I don't want to lose it." drisc275

"The present firefox bookmark files are really hard to manage for normal users. If you search it on google, you will get an answer with a long location address (for the bookmark files) from your root path on the hard disk. What makes the matter worse, firefox 2.0 and firefox 3.0 use different formats to save the bookmarks. Firefox 2.0 uses a more static, page-like organization, while firefox 3.0 uses a database based organization that facilitates bookmark searching. But all these are too difficult for normal users to figure out. I remember that once my system crashed, and I had a firefox upgraded from 2.0 to 3.0 on the system. I trusted my experience and backed up the bookmark file under the 'favorites' folder. After I reinstalled my system, it turned out that I had only backed up the 2.0 version bookmark file that could no longer be used in firefox 3.0. And the real version 3.0 bookmark file was stored in a totally different place. What a frustrating experience!" Myu

"I am a heavy tabbed browser user. Sometimes I have up to 6 separate windows with different subjects organized by window. Often when browsing, it is a mix of regular sites that I visit like gmail or the new york times and new sites that I navigate to from links at the older sites. In reviewing sites that I normally visit and unique sites, it's difficult for me to go through the history and find how I got to the unique sites because the history tree shows only general information about the frequently viewed sites, and no images that might give me a clue to how I got from one place to another. After enough browsing, I can't trace back to determine how I navigated to each site or when a tab became a new window." lsimpson

"I often go on lengthy 'research 'sessions' where I have a search site open in a tab at the far left, and I command+click the results that look interesting to open them in new tabs. I read through the new tabs from left to right, gathering information and command+clicking links as I go, resulting in a vaguely exponential increase in tabs and information. When I finally find what I was looking for, it is amidst a tangled web of tabs. To hang on to it, I make a mental note of the 'path' I took to get there. To return later, I often repeat the original search in google, and use the purple 'visited' links as breadcrumbs leading me back to the page I want. I don't bother with history or bookmarks as they are both unmanageable in their current state. I find myself asking 'what did I search for again?' when looking for old data" ramseynasser

"I tend to have a lot of things going on at once with my tabs - right now, for example, I have three different webmail sessions; an article that my mom sent me last week that I haven't read yet; a page on an interactive fiction game I've been meaning to download and play; information on an NSF grant program that I decided not to apply for but want to keep in mind; a couple of pages about an online game I'm currently obsessed with; two tabs on White Nose Syndrome for a school project; and I could go on. In my mind these belong in groups - Leisure; Things I Need to Read or Store; Mail; School Projects. I sometimes group tabs into separate windows, but there's no easy way to restore that group of tabs if I close the window, so I tend to just leave everything open. I could bookmark the tabs, but then they get lost in my enormous Bookmarks menu, which is agonizing to scroll through. I've also tried using Session Managers to hang onto tab groups, but all the ones I've tried cause performance issues and they often crash the browser altogether." margaretmoser

Survey Questions

Based on the user stories and other initial research, what kinds of questions about browsing history could we formulate to find more perspective on the problems we've established? Fill in any number of questions below. They can be short answer, multiple choice, Likert scale (1 to 5 or 1 to 7, strongly disagree to strongly agree), true/false, or anything else you find appropriate.

Questions Team 2 (Aaron, Andrea, Yoon) (Will be revised)

1. What do you think is the most important/helpful clue to find out/remember a website that you visited? (Rank)
- Image (Look:Font/Layout/Color/Logo)
- Keywords (Tags)
- Sound/music
- Title of the page or website
- Address (URL/Domain)
- Type/Characteristic of page (Category)

2. Do you use: - Windows - Tabs - Both

3. How many tabs/windows do you have open right now?

4. When is the last time you shut down your browser?

5. What browsers do you use?

- Google Chrome
- Firefox
- Safari
- IE
- Opera
- Camino

Why do you use that browser (strengths/weaknesses)?

6. What bookmarking tools do you use?

- digg
- reddit
- delicious
- built-in browser bookmark

Why do you use that bookmarking tool (strengths/weaknesses)?

7. When you try to find a page you were looking at, do you:
- try to recreate the path from main site (ex: searching for sports article in nytimes, you start at nytimes homepage)
- look from a search engine, using keywords

8. Would you like an option to save the current state of opened pages? (including all opened windows and tabs)

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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)
• Quick history view for each tabs