Is a Picture Worth A Thousand Words : Introduction

In 1998, Benjermin Bederson, et. al. performed two usability studies of Padprints. The first addressed general navigation effectiveness. The second focused on history-related aspects of navigation. We studied the visualization issues. Our study determinde which of two attribute plays a greater role in the success of the history map. The attributes are thumbnail pictures and web page titles.

We have implemented a browser companion called Padprints that dinamically builds a graphical history-map of visited web pages. Padprints relys on Pad++, a zooming user interface (ZUI) development substrate, to displaying the history-map using minimal screen space. Padprints functions in cunjunction with a traditional web page but without requiring any browser modification. [1]


Almost all of the code for PadPrints was previously written by Ben Bederson and his collegues. Only slight modifications were neccessary in order to perform our experiment. For the text only treatment we prevent PadPrints from capturing the image of Netscape. For the image only treatment, we set the title string to nothing.


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