Design Guidelines for Effective WWW History Mechanisms

This paper presents design guidelines for history mechanisms within graphical World Wide browsers, and describes the methodology used to formulate them. Our hypothesis is that users revisit World Wide Web (WWW) pages, and that an examination of individual's WWW navigation patterns can provide insight into the design of history systems. Data was collected from 23 subjects who used an instrumented version of Xmosaic 2.6 for six weeks. The data was analyzed in three ways. First, we assessed the extent to which pages are revisited. Second, we examined five possible patterns of page reuse. Third, we applied various conditioning methods for history lists to evaluate current and alternative approaches. From these empirical results combined with previous research into history systems, nine design guidelines for graphical WWW browser history mechanisms were derived. These guidelines address the following: access to previously visited pages; cognitive and physical effort of using a history mechanism; strategies for offering pages for selection; and end-user customization of the history data