Webwatch: Exploring Visualization Techniques for Viewing & Sharing Bookmarks

Cathy Eichholz Polk

Intro     Motivation  Visualizations     Design Requirements   Documents    Related Work



Design Requirements

Several design requirements must be taken into consideration with this prototype.

Overview & Detail Views:
With large datasets, it becomes very easy to lose sight of the overall picture - we only see a few trees in the forest instead of seeing where we are located within that forest.  Therefore the system prototpye must allow a user to be able to examine details of URLs without losing sight of the URL's position within the entire collection.  This means that an overview of the entire collection should be present at all times no matter how deeply we delve into the collection.

Flexible Bookmark Organization:
Organization of bookmarks within a collection should not be limited to manual organization by the user and/or one or two sorting methods.  We want to provide a potential user with several organization options that are easy to use and intuit.  Sorting not only alphabetically, but by domain and by person allows a user to gain a different perspective of the collection.  Other sorting methods, such as sorting by popularity or frequency of access, or any number of other metrics, may also prove useful.

Support for Searching & Browsing:
With a group collection, providing a comprehensive searching functionality is a must.  Providing a highly interactive interface for navigating the bookmarks collection will allow users to more easily discover similarities or differences between their own collection and that of others.  Also, we hypothesize that a constrained search engine that searches only the group space for relevant document links will return a higher percentage of trusted and useful resources without inundating the user with thousands of search results.
 

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