Prompt
As part of a design assignment, our task was to look at how applications employ design elements to aid in memory recall through visual cues and contextual information. We started by exploring various themes where information recall plays or can potentially play an important part. Some of our initial ideas included augmenting search results with contextual information, archiving and categorizing online activities for future reflection, sustaining relationships through digital mediation and analysing device notifications over time to minimize human distraction.
Our research and analysis of how current web browsers display user history became an interesting topic to further explore. Coupling that with our idea of augmenting search results with contextual information also proved to be an interesting factor to consider within the context of displaying web history.
Process
“Remembering is an act of reconstruction rather than reproduction” {Barlett - 1932}
We started off with a literature review with a focus on work pertaining to memory from a purely psychological standpoint to its applications in improving information browsing and context awareness. Through discussions and analyzing existing implementations of current browsers we defined our focus on the ability to search faster and adding more conxtextual information per entry.
Sketching, Wireframing and Usability Testing
With this focus, we started creating sketches on paper to explore ideas. We did a basic heuristic evaluation on our initial feature set of visual elements and layouts to narrow down to ones that were creating the most impact. We turned to interactive wireframing to create functional prototypes of each of these features to do usability testing with. We conducted two small test sessions with time in between to reflect and brainstorm to improve our design. Confident of our direction, we created hi-fidelity prototypes to present our design.
Outcome
“What was that page that I found some days back through my facebook feed?”
Historian is a proof-of-concept re-design of how web browsers history page. The design’s focus is on improving search by providing information of events and interactions that occured surrounding a page visit. Media focused webpages are represented more visually through images and video thumbnails. With more data per entry, Historian’s visual design focused on presenting it without overwhelming the user.
The timeline provides an overview of the entire browsing history represented solely through website favicons for a quick glance of the users movement. The user can then drill down quickly via the list on its left. Other notable features include grouping together of acitvity on a single website or application which can be expanded; interaction adn visual data on hover and also providing the amount of time spent through a bargraph like visual in the background.
