BEYOND THE 'BACK' BUTTON: ISSUES OF PAGE REPRESENTATIONAND ORGANISATION IN GRAPHICAL WEB NAVIGATION TOOLS
Date
1999-04-01
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Abstract
Although the 'Back' button is good for revisiting very recently seen pages
on the world-wide web, its recency and stack-based model makes it inefficent
for navigating back to distant pages. The limitations of 'Back' have
motivated researchers and developers to investigate graphical aids for web
browsing. This paper examines the design and usability issues in two
fundamental questions that all graphical tools for web-navigation must
address: first, how can individual pages be represented to best support
page identification?; and second, what display organisation schemes can be
used to enhance the visualisation of large sets of previously visited pages?
Our 'webView' graphical browsing system, which interacts with unaltered
versions of Netscape Navigator, demonstrates new interface techniques for
page representation and display organisation. WebView's page identification
techniques included zoomable thumbnail images and a 'dogears' metaphor that
offers a lightweight mechanism for bookmarking. Its display is organised
using an integrated hybrid of three techniques: 'hub-and-spoke', which models
the user's navigation within a site; 'site-maps', which model navigation
between sites; and temporal organisation, which provides a recency ordered
list of the visited sites.
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Computer Science