Visualizing the World-Wide Web with the Navigational View Builder To help alleviate the problem of being lost in hyperspace, the Navigational View Builder is a tool that allows users to construct visualizations of the information space [11]. To form effective view, it uses binding, clustering, filtering and hierarchization. The strategies analyzing the underlying space for forming the visualizations using a combination of structural and content analysis.
Browsing Hierarchical Data with Multi-level Dynamic Queries and Pruning The PDQ Tree-browser (Pruning with Dynamic Queries) is a visualization tool designed to help users find the nodes that they are in search of, that meet their information need, when hierarchies contain several nodes [12]. This tool displays trees in two tightly-coupled views. One view is a detailed view and the other is a summary. To filter nodes at each level of the tree, users can use dynamic queries. Dynamic queries allow them to quickly filter data. A controlled experiment, using 24 participants, revealed that pruning significantly improved subjective user satisfaction as well performance speed.
Elastic Windows: A Hierarchical Multi-Window World-Wide Web Browser This publication presents a browsing interface with multiple hierarchical windows and efficient multiple window operations [10]. This interface provide an alterable environment that helps users to quickly filter, organize, and restructure the information on the screen as their information need changes. This interface also displays overviews that give the user a sense of location in browsing history and provides quick access to a hierarchy of pages.
Using Graphic History in Browsing the World Wide Web This paper presents MosaicG, a tool that enhances the history-keeping facility of the NCSA Mosaic 2.5 browser by providing a two-dimensional view of the pages a user has visited in a given session [1]. It functions as a browser companion in navigating a collection of hypertext documents. The Graphic History View helps the user to easily identify a previously visited page by displaying titles, URLs, and thumbnail images of the documents a user has visited in a session. The Graphic History also aids the user in analyzing the structure of a set of hypertext documents.
Pad++: Advances in Multiscale Interfaces This paper discusses Pad++, a tool implemented to explore smooth zooming for navigation [4]. This tool also serves as a basis for information visualization. Pad++ was designed to allow the capability of working with large datasets. The user can search for more detailed information by zooming in on the interface, ‘taking a closer look’.
A Zooming Web Browser A prototype zooming World-Wide Web browser is developed within Pad++ [2]. Multiple pages along with the links between them are displayed in a large, zoomable environment. Pages are sized so that the page in view is clearly legible. Connecting pages are shown in smaller sizes to give a sense of context. In quantitatively comparing, performance with the Pad++ Web browser and Netscape, initially, subjects answered questions slightly slower with Pad++ than with Netscape when asking users to answer questions about a specific Web site. After applying some improvements to Pad++, subjects answered questions 23% faster than those using Netscape did.
This paper also mentions WebMap, which is a browser companion that shows a graphical relationship between pages. Each page is shown as a small circle that is selected to display the actual page. The links between the pages are color-coded to show information about the links, whether the page has already been viewed or whether its is a link to a different server. WebBook, a Xerox Parc production, is a three-dimensional Web browser that allows several pages to be displayed simultaneously. It also supports collections of pages in books that replace bookmark files.
Intermedia Illustration This paper includes illustrations of a number of key Intermedia features [17]. A feature of interest is the WebView that shows the user all of the documents connected to the current document. When a link icon is selected in the present document, the associated link lines are highlighted in the Web View.
Hypertext Hands-On This book explains an advantage and disadvantage of a hierarchical representation [3]. An advantage is that all links must follow an orderly route through the hierarchy. A disadvantage is that there is limited flexibility of the links among nodes. Nodes cannot be linked in a random way.
There is also mention of Hyperties, an application that allows the user to retrace his steps and return to previous screens or articles. Also included in Hyperties is a History feature that shows all of the articles read in a session. This helps provide a model of traversal to reduce disorientation.
IBM’s WBI History Functions IBM’s Web Browser Intelligence (WBI) tool is another browser companion, like PadPrints, that has personal history functions that are intended to make web browsing more efficient by
· annotating hyperlinks on all web pages with traffic signals to show probable connection speed,
· remembering where you have been and providing a keyword search through the text of pages already visited,
· noticing patterns in your web browsing behavior and suggesting shortcuts, and
· automatically checking your favorite Web pages for changes [16].
WebTOC WebTOC, a Java program and applet, is a method for visualizing the contents of a website with a hierarchical table of contents [11]. It has an automatic expand/contract table of contents that provide graphical information indicating the number of elements in branches of the hierarchy as well as sizes, both individual and cumulative. User studies infer that WebTOC can be helpful in navigating websites and is easily learned.
A controlled experiment involving Netscape and WebTOC found no statistically significant differences between interfaces. This may be due to the limited number of subjects. Results showed that WebTOC is more appropriate for complex tasks, where users have to traverse many levels of the hierarchy and for tasks where size comparisons are necessary between nodes in the hierarchy. Netscape users performed better using the textual table of contents than users of WebTOC. While the increase in difficulty ratings was not significantly different, Netscape users gave increasingly higher difficulty ratings to tasks performed in Netscape in the user satisfaction survey. Having WebTOC available also increased the feeling of organization of the site.
Another experiment conducted over 6 weeks of a commercial web browser found that 58% of an individual’s pages are revisits, and that users continually add new pages into their collection of visited pages. People generally 1) revisit pages just visited, 2) access only a few pages frequently, 3) browse in very small groups of related pages, 4) and generate only short sequences of URL paths.
In comparing different history mechanisms, the stack-based prediction method prevalent in commercial browsers is inferior to the simpler approach of showing the last few recently visited URLs minus the duplicates.
In this study, seven browsing patterns were identified:
2.1 Other Tools and Techniques
Treemaps was an earlier technique used to browse or visualize directory structures [11]. It was useful in compactly presenting size and type information about directory structures. It also demonstrated the importance of an overview and using visualization to locate unusually large documents, documents that seem out of place, or duplicate documents.
WebBook is a tool that aids users in organizing their web activities [11]. The metaphor is a book in which the contents are web pages that the user can flip through and select from. The pages can be bookmarked as well. Furna’s fisheye view paradigm is used to provide an overview for the contents of the book. In Fisheye view graphs, the center of interest is shown in a large scale and with great detail, while the other areas are successively smaller and less detailed.
Hyperbolic visualization is a subset of the fisheye paradigm [11]. The hierarchy is arranged uniformly on a hyperbolic plane and mapped onto a circular display.
Top | Credits | Introduction | Literature Review | Experiment | Results | Discussion | Conclusions | Acknowledgements | References | Appendices
Last Modified May 11, 1998