Effective browsing and serendipitous discovery with an experience-infused browser

In the digital age, users can have perfect recall of their digital experiences. In this paper, we explore how this recall can be leveraged during web browsing. We have built a system called the Experience-Infused Browser that indexes a user’s digital history from email and chat archives. As the user browses the web, it observes the contents of pages viewed, and highlights named entities on the page that the user has encountered in the past. This browser has two benefits. First, it highlights terms on the page that occur frequently in the user’s archive, effectively personalizing the page for the user. Second, the system can remind the user of names that she has encountered in the past but may not remember. We evaluated how users reacted to the browser during organic web browsing. Our users have reported that it was useful on crowded web pages to surface content that they otherwise may have missed, and in recalling serendipitous connections to people that they had forgotten. Most ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: IUI
• Authors: Sudheendra Hangal, Abhinay Nagpal, Monica S. Lam
• Keywords: Digital History, Information Interfaces, IUI 2012, Organic Web, Software Engineering