Browsing History – How can we make sense of this rich source of data and how do we best present this data to the user?

User research

Our first step was to gather information about how the users use the browsing history. We used techniques like brainstorming, survey, interview and user evaluation. It is very interesting to see that here in Brazil we found similar results that other universities also found doing user research in countries like Australia and USA. For example the fact that some user profiles use the Google Search to looking for a previous visited site.

My concept

I wanted to explore the fact that nowadays the people write and read a lot of content on dynamic pages like Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader and the current history browsing not reflect all the user really accessed. Other point was that many users use search to looking for history of navigation. So I wanted to enrich the search-box with tags related to content types and dates.

I used an image of the mock-up of Firefox 4 with a html iframe, css and javascript to simulate a browser.

Feedback

We had the opportunity to present and receive feedback direct of Mozilla Labs team via video conference. It was awesome . We receive a feedback by email as well and follow the feedback of my concept:

Great observation that the actual usage pattern of end users has shifted from pure consumption to participation and that thus history can/should be seen in a different context

Good, practical solution to auto-generate tags from readily available information such as date or content type

Extension of the Awesomebar with additional information is useful, especially for less tech-savy users

Grouping by content might be an interesting concept — as users often remember the type of content they are looking for (e.g. “a video”)

Surfacing of dates as relative hooks might make sense (e.g. last month) but is probably better exposed in a graphical way than through a text interface

Thumbnail view can be problematic once you have a lot of search results

Learned lessons

• User research is very important for innovation. Techniques like surveys, user evaluation and interviews can be very fast and cheap.

• How to present a concept using paper prototyping, html/javascript prototyping or image mock-ups.

• Internet is very useful to help us to show our ideas up around the world.


Take a look at all the concepts of PUC Minas and others universities >>