Exploring Digital Elements for Visualizing Time in Personal Information Re-finding

Psychological theories on memory of time suggest that people naturally remember ‘events’ rather than the ‘dates’ and ‘hours’. These features are, however, usually required by computer applications for desktop search (information re-finding) tasks. This explains why ‘time’ features are not well remembered for desktop search, as reported in some studies. In order to improve on this situation, we proposed our iCLIPS browser interface, which enables user re-fining initial search results using a suggestive timeline, where visualization elements representing landmark events and important computer activities were displayed. These visual elements on the time line were expected to act as episodic memory cues to help users recollect their search target by recognizing their episodic context. This interface is built on top of a personal search engine providing a unified index of all the information a user has encountered or created, such as documents, web pages, email, and personal photos. We present a pilot study to explore the types of these visual. The result and suggestions for future main study were discussed