Browser Thumbnails

A nice review of systems using web page thumbnails at comp.human-factors.
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Posted at NaN:NaN

The source of things

Over at the lazyWeb, there's a call for bookmarks remembering their referrer. I've looked into this for Mozilla and found that the RDF assert system is only set up to commit and load known attributes.  Shouldn't be hard to turn this into a for-i-in scenario.

We could trace this with Mozilla APIs if referrer were kept in history, per the spec (bug).

Only storing referrer for bookmarks would reduce the amount of data incurred, at the cost of related context..  The source of a page of interest might be several pages back in the referrer chain. |||
Posted at NaN:NaN, Published in: Ideas

The Back Button Drop-Down

Reading Jason Marshall's dissertation, I ran across the interesting observation that Netscape reversed the ordering of the back button drop down. In Mosaic, more recent pages appeared at the bottom while Netscape put them at the top.  Given that the first few items are easily accessible through back button clicks, the Mosaic system might make more sense.  As I recall, neither system had a menu-dropdown integrated into the back button.
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Posted at NaN:NaN

Interaction Design on the Portal

  

This is a set of three views.  A sample layout is shown below, with two modes displayed. The green, overlayed with ovlive, is the original layout. The olive is the view with focus on the lower left box -- corresponding to expanded state in the image above.



The point of all this is improve the expanded view of a of bookmarks in the bookmark portal ( ).  Some constraints and enablers:

• No traditional scrolling
• this is navigation not reading
• Primary goal is rapid navigation
• order by visit count
• decrement placement for recent visit?
• ideally we'd know visit frequency and modulate
  
• Don't move text while the user is reading it
• not unless you do it really well, typically timed presentation
  

Todo items:

• indicate scroll position
• order / reverse order by visit count
• promote container to root
• collapse folder and bring in another
• shuffle?
• spatial nav

It's a bit ironic to me that I'm crafting a custom scrollbar, after having railed about the usability flaws in numerous custom, and typically partially, implemented text reading scrollers in Flash.  My only defense is that this design is very task oriented.
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Posted at NaN:NaN

Project Oriented Hypertext

The glancing design web is an interesting use of hypertext to germinate a project.  The mozwho blog is a similiar construct and I'm puzzling how to incoporate traditional user centered design deliverables into such an infrastructure.
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Posted at NaN:NaN