MyWebSteps: Aiding revisiting with a visual web history

This research addresses the general topic of 'keeping found things found' by investigating difficulties people encounter when revisiting webpages, and designing and evaluating a novel tool that addresses those difficulties. The research focused on occasional revisits - webpages that people have previously visited on only one day, a week or more ago (i.e. neither frequently nor recently). A 3-month logging study was combined with a laboratory experiment to identify 10 underlying causes of participants' revisiting failure. Overall, 61% of the failures occurred when a webpage had originally been accessed via search results, was on a topic a participant often looked at or was on a known but large website. Then, we designed a novel visual Web history tool to address the causes of failure and implemented it as a Firefox add-on. The tool was evaluated in a 3-month field study, helped participants succeed on 96% of revisits, and was also used by some participants to review and reminisce about their 'travels' online. Revised versions of the tool have been publicly released as the Firefox add-on MyWebSteps