Designing for Web Revisitation: Exploiting Structure from User Interaction and Navigation

High percentage of Web access are visits to pages that the user has already seen in the past. Currently available support for page revisitation, through standard browser features, and suggested improvements have been based on simple history models which do not fully incorporate information about the user's interaction with the Web and the resulting navigation structure. In our research we propose a syntax for parsing navigation history into structural elements that has proven useful for identifying patterns in the history and building features for supporting habitual Web usage. This approach is motivated by our exploratory user observation study which revealed the need for effective revisitation of key pages in the short navigation history and for supporting user in recurring Web activities observed over the long term history. We designed SmartNavigation features that address both scenarios and evaluate their usefulness through a contextual user study. Findings of the study provide further guidelines for designing revisitation support and validate the history model that we advocate.