Time, topic and trawl: stories about how we reach our past
Venue
DIS '12 Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference, ACM New York, NY, USA (2012), pp. 234-243
Publication Year
2012
Authors
Joon-Suk Lee, Deborah Tatar, Elin Rønby Pedersen
BibTeX
Abstract
Legacy web tools attempt to build on information that uses have when they
originally conduct web research. In contrast, we examine the information that they
have at the time when they attempt to recreate their past. We interviewed 11
non-expert users twice a week for eight weeks in their own physical and
computational environments. We used both Google web histories and the prototype
Research Trails system as prompts to probe how the participants viewed their past
web experiences and how they reconstructed them. The Research Trails system lets
users utilize information about both time and topic to help themselves remember and
resume everyday research tasks. Based on these observations, a model of users'
perceived past web activities informed the iterative refinement of the Research
Trails system. The user may see a past action as belonging to multiple categories
at the same time or as in different categories at different time
