How People Recognize Previously Seen WWW Pages from Titles, URLs and Thumbnails

Kaasten, S., Greenberg, S. and Edwards, C. (2002)
How People Recognize Previously Seen WWW Pages from Titles, URLs and Thumbnails. In X. Faulkner, J. Finlay, F. Detienne (Ed.) People and Computers XVI (Proceedings of Human Computer Interaction 2002 - HCI'02), pages 247-265. BCS Conference Series, Springer Verlag. Earlier version as Report 2001-692-15, December.

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Abstract

The selectable lists of pages offered by web browsers' history and bookmark facilities ostensibly make it easier for people to return to previously visited pages. These lists show the pages as abstractions, typically as truncated titles and URLs, and more rarely as small thumbnail images. Yet we have little knowledge of how recognizable these representations really are. Consequently, we carried out a study that compared the recognizability of thumbnails between various image sizes, and of titles and URLs between various string sizes. Our results quantify the tradeoff between the size of these representations and their recognizability. These findings directly contribute to how history and bookmark lists should be designed.

Bibtex entry

@INCOLLECTION { 2002-ThumbnailStudy.BHCI,
CLASS = { CONFARTICLE },
AUTHOR = { Kaasten, S. and Greenberg, S. and Edwards, C. },
TITLE = { How People Recognize Previously Seen WWW Pages from Titles, URLs and Thumbnails },
BOOKTITLE = { People and Computers XVI (Proceedings of Human Computer Interaction 2002 - HCI'02) },
PAGES = { 247-265 },
YEAR = { 2002 },
PUBLISHER = { BCS Conference Series, Springer Verlag },
EDITOR = { X. Faulkner, J. Finlay, F. Detienne },
NOTE = { Earlier version as Report 2001-692-15, December },
}