Webmarking Managing Web Bookmarks and Browser History Files

Webmarking Managing Web Bookmarks and Browser History Files in One Interface Masako Sho, Hans Christian von Krogh, Petter Johnstad and Mohammed Shamma IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development

Goals l Interface design: – Bookmark and history browser UI that would serve as a bridge across multiple Web browsers. – Affordances should conform with that of the current windowing UI. – Provide new ways of viewing bookmarks and history files so as to provide a better means of managing them. IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development

Addressed Problems l The usability of interfaces* for bookmarks and history files is not maximized due to the following: – They are not integrated – Their UI’s do not conform to the conventions of the windowing environment. – They do not take advantage of more “effective” Gestalt properties of history files. *(Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator) IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development

Pilot Usability Test l Determine which problems are due to prototyping limitations and those due to design limitations. l Performed same scenarios this time measuring user error and task completion time. – Scenario A: Users learned UI quickly – Scenario B: Users had trouble navigating through the map view -- concept needs to be revisited. – Scenario C: Calendar seemed to be a good feature but needed some refinements (I. e. we needed to apply more calendaring conventions to it). IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development

Final UI Design – Changes • • Added “View” menu to task bar Created a dialog for adding bookmarks Bookmark properties now easier to view Replaced lines with arrows to show directions in the map view • Fixed some of the wording in the calendar view IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development

Organizing bookmarks and folders IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development

Map view IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development

Calendar View IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development

Conclusion l l Should have started out with Java. Not VB. The map and calendar views appear to be useful, but we’re still not completely certain about the correct method of providing the necessary interface to them. We were surprised that the map was relatively the least popular with participants. Lessons learned – The tasks of providing such an interface is much harder than we initially thought. Although user input was helpful, we would probably need much more development time, much stricter measuring techniques and a much larger participant group. IS 213 -- User Interface Design and Development