My favorites (bookmarks) schema – one solution to online information storage and retrieval

Dealing with the overwhelming daily amount of online information is perhaps the biggest challenge faced by all computer users, whether they are novices or experienced professionals. How, where and when to store information sources, such as websites, is becoming increasingly difficult as people spend more of their life online and use the internet in all aspects of their lives. Our survey of 202 internet users found that although 85% of the participants regularly use the favorites (bookmarks) function, 73% still have trouble finding a website that they have recently visited. Whether the strategy is to bookmark in a single massive list and use the search tool, or to bookmark into folders and sub-folders several levels deep, appears to make very little difference. This research proposes a contrarian approach, giving users a highly structured favorites (bookmarks) schema using only two levels, consisting of four main headings and 12 sub-headings. An open card sorting task was used to validate the utility of such an approach. The results and their impact towards a future user-based knowledge structure are presented in this paper