Abstract

Browsing Icons is a tool to support revisitation of web pages. To do this, it dynamically draws animated graphs of the users' paths as they surf the web. Compared to using a plain web browser, people can revisit web pages faster when they use these visualizations. A study showed that they also enjoy the visualizations more than Netscape alone.

The figure on the right shows the user interface:

a. The tool is placed on the right side of a common web browser (overlaid miniature).

b. Tasks and sessions are organized hierarchically in the Task Chooser.

c. The Session View shows an interactive graph of the current web session. Layout is animated. Clicking a circle opens the corresponding page in the browser.

d. The Task View shows miniature versions of all session graphs that belong to the current task. It is also interactive.

e. Moving the mouse over a node shows a thumbnail and further information in the Detail View.

Further details can be found in these publications.