Designing for Navigating Personal Web Information: Retrieval Cues

Usage tracking has provided us with evidence that hotlists, bookmarks and favorites folders are the navigation tools most frequently used by users in information foraging tasks on the web (Pitkow & Recker, 1996). Usability studies, as well as basic research, however, indicate that the current web browser designs are sub-optimal in supporting users’ cognitive models of the web and the information they repeatedly consume (Abrams, 1997; Tauscher & Greenberg, 1997). This study examines what specific attributes of a web page are efficient retrieval cues for the user: the title, summary information, or a graphical image of the page. We found a reliable difference across these kinds of retrieval cues using a variety of performance measures. The results showed, not unsurprisingly, that the title information is the most beneficial retrieval cue, given our current text-centric browser design. We then present specific design examples that demonstrate how adding simple visual cues might enhance today’s browsers. Future work will explore how to leverage other aspects of memory during the retrieval of stored web information, especially spatial cognition and other, image-based mnemonic aids.