Labs/Design-Challenge/Uni-Fall09

Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Uni Fall '09

Research

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

Labs/Design-Challenge/Uni-Fall09/User Stories

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.

Take the survey!

Student-Created Survey Questions

Survey Responses

• Google Spreadsheet Page of Parsons ACC Lab results
• Results from the University of Sydney class

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

Prototypes

Jetpack Experiments

First Round

• Halloween | Link
• Hassel | Link
• New York Times - Times Wire headlines visualizer | Link