Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich Institute of Computer Science Media Informatics and Human-Computer Interaction Groups Prof. Dr. Heinrich Hußmann Master’s Thesis Utilizing Users’ Web Browsing and Search Behavior to Improve Website Revisitation Sven Unnewehr
[email protected] Date: October 27, 2015 Duration: May 1, 2015 to October 31, 2015 Company: CLIQZ GmbH Supervisor at Company: Dr. Sean Gustafson Supervisor at University: Prof. Dr. Florian Alt Abstract Internet users regularly need to re-find information or content that they looked at in the past. In some cases, these revisitations take place weeks after the initial visit. Long- term revisitations, also called rediscoveries, are often time-consuming, prone to failure and require high mental effort. Existing research showed that current browsers poorly support this activity requiring users to rely on less efficient strategies, such as re-creating queries or re-tracing previous browsing paths, to find the desired information. In two formative studies, I confirmed the existing findings and showed that, on average, rediscoveries take about the same time as the initial search for the information, users often fail because of trouble identifying pages and users are unable to make use of contextual memories. These insights led me to the development of the CLIQZ Browsing History, which acts as a replacement for the browser’s history list. Common user behaviors and memories are directly supported by grouping the history into sessions, by showing context and by providing a searchable query history. Additionally, users are able to explore previous browsing paths and recognize pages using mouseover previews. To evaluate the developed tool, I conducted an evaluation, which confirmed the benefits of the underlying concepts with a promising performance increase after continued usage and users needing significantly fewer page visits for successful rediscoveries.