user needs hooeey!?
While surfing through the big W3 I just stumbled on an interesting web-usability research. The results were presented on the CHI 2007 conference, an event regarding Computer-Human Interaction (HCI). Every year 2000 HCI professionals, academics, and students discuss HCI and research issues and exchange knowledge regarding the topic. The focus is on how people communicate and interact with a broadly-defined range of computer systems.
The research goes along with the title “Web Page Revisitation Revisited: Implications of a Long-term Click-stream Study of Browser Usage”. It is based on an experiment within the web surfing behavior of 25 participants with diverse backgrounds was captured over a period of six month. The drawn conclusion of this research is quoted below:
“We identified opportunities for the development of new browser tools that target not the bulk of revisits, but specialize on certain user requirements for revisitation. Support for observational behavior is already given by RSS feeds, but little is known on their usability and presentation. Reutilization is partly provided by special browser extensions and appliances like ‘widgets’, yet the integration of Web services and office applications is still rarely possible.
Finally, a neglected field of research seems to be browser support for rediscovering resources that have been accessed a longer time ago. These revisits were quite rare, but often important. Neither browser history nor bookmarks seem to be reliable tools for long-term rediscovery. Instead, users re-searched and re-traced the Web for the desired information. As missing original pages often caused problems, a searchable copy of search terms, visited pages and user trails could severely enhance long-term revisitation support.”
As far as I reckoning my own surf behavior I agree to the conclusion. This insight kept me happy because this problem will be solve while using hooeey.