Revisiting Read Wear: Analysis, Design, and Evaluation of a Footprints Scrollbar Jason Alexander 1, Andy Cockburn 1, Stephen Fitchett 1, Carl Gutwin 2, Saul Greenberg 3 1 Dept. of Computer Science 2 Dept. of Computer Science 3 Dept. of Computer Science University of Canterbury University of Saskatchewan University of Calgary Christchurch, New Zealand Saskatoon, Canada Alberta, Canada {jason, andy, saf75}
[email protected] [email protected] @cosc.canterbury.ac.nz ABSTRACT having attended to the thumb’s location during previous In this paper, we show that people frequently return to visits, remembering it, and reproducing it accurately. One previously-visited regions within their documents, and that or more of these activities can fail. In their comparison of scrollbars can be enhanced to ease this task. We analysed navigation in paper and electronic documents O’Hara and 120 days of activity logs from Microsoft Word and Adobe Sellen [25] observed that people use fingers to mark Reader. Our analysis shows that region revisitation is a document regions in paper documents for easy return, and common activity that can be supported with relatively short that equivalent methods are lacking when scrolling. They recency lists. This establishes an empirical foundation for conclude that scrolling is “irritatingly slow and distracting” the design of an enhanced scrollbar containing scrollbar and that people need “quicker, more effortless navigation” marks that help people return to previously visited [25], p.341. document regions. Two controlled experiments show that scrollbar marks decrease revisitation time, and that a large One way to improve support for revisitation is by number of marks can be used effectively.