We started with the idea of redesigning the history of browser.

History objectives:
The main objective of the history is to allow the user go back to a page to he doesn't remember the URL. Another objective that we thought involves understanding the browsing patterns.

Problems:
With the actual history feature, users have problem to recognize a page by its name, url or hour. Beyond that, only the individual records are shown, so that the user doesn't have an overview.

Requirements:

- Increase the recognition of pages.
- Get recommendations of pages.
- Allow the knowledge of browsing habits.

Design Specs:

-Exhibit the individual records as snapshots in a timeline instead of text.
-Visual mapping to show the area of snapshots according to the frequency and time on page (the higher the time spent on a page and the lower the frequency of that page, higher the area of snapshot), grouping pages of the same site and showing the one the user spent more time.
- As an advanced option, on mouse over in the snapshot of the page, can be showed the browsing paths related to the navigation to that page.
- Potential future: based on the pages visited by the user, this functionality shows recommendations of pages that the user may interest, like the Genius feature in iTunes.
-Show navigation summary in a dashboard of the user.

Hi All, I'm not a UI Designer or anything. But, I think I liked the way the Visuwords site is made. It is a 3D sort of interface with the mouse-scroll buttni used for zoom.

I think, if this is used in a way that the zoom usage depicts timeline, and the nodes are connected on the basis of topics/urls (Central node - date, primary nodes - the sites, tertiary nodes - the pages/url's on the site) then it would be a pretty handy little feature.

Better still if the nodes also show a thumbnail of the page.

As this would be a one hand operation (time navigation and history navigation accomplished through the mouse) it would be very user firendly.

I've also attached a screenshot of the site below.

My solution is in part influenced by the findings of one of the Challenge’s recommended readings: Jason Hong, Contextual Web History: Using Visual and Contextual Cues to Improve Web Browser History (PDF), and other existing web-based mechanisms for managing visual assets (e.g. Flickr).

One of the findings of the paper was that visual cues in the shape of thumbnail images of visited websites helped users to better identify sites in their browsing history: the most useful size of these thumbnails was found to be around 235 by 148 pixels (p.5). This visual approach to representing history is being used by other browsers, including Safari and Chrome.

My idea expands on the use of visual cues for browsing history and also applies them them to bookmarks, tabs, credentials and history. As the data in this example becomes visual, it also lends itself to being managed by tools similar to those for managing photos and other visual assets on social networking sites. The Flickr model of page layout and set (”folder”) management, mainly due to its familiarity to me seemed to be of particular use.

Providing an interface for the saved passwords is crutial; With Weave I didn't have to type any password for a long time, but when I installed my new computer and Weave was acting up (weird Firefox version mismatch or something) I had to type in passwords for many sites I used to let Weave log me in to automatically.

That's when I realized I didn't remember many of my passwords! I login to these sites every day, but I don't remember the passwords because Weave helps me sign in! 

So, my solution has two parts:

1. A basic UI for "remembering" passwords that leads to the final Web UI.

2. A suggestion for the passwords Web UI.

I hope this will get somewhere, or at least the idea of reminding passwords. I may not have designing skills, but I think my idea is needed!

 Objective:

To provide intuitive and useful visual representations of the browser data such as:

·         Bookmarks

·         History

·         Tabs

·         Stored Credentials

Representing History:

I believe the best way to present the browsed webpages is through the display of thumbnails, as is also suggested in Contextual Web History: Using Visual and Contextual Cues to Improve Web Browser History. So the webpages in the history should be arranged from the most recent to the oldest one. Same kind of representation is shown in Chrome and Safari, except Safari looks more elegant. I have also given some designs for displaying bookmarks in the web browser.The prototypes for my design can be found in my blog.

For this design challenge I chose to focus on new ideas for visualizing history data. What guided me through the design process were my own experiences of digging through history lists to find forgotten links. I asked myself what were the questions I dealt with when searching for a website I have encountered before, and what were the tools or approaches that might have help me along. I came up with 4 interactive visualizations, each handling the subject thorough a different lens. These are just initial drafts, showcasing the general idea.

You may see clearly where you go by creating tabs !

A new tab means a new homepage tab creation in my solution.

Maybe a new challenge box !

Creating tab history ?

Keep in mind that firefox can already remember your tabs for the next session. By more creating tabs and using this option, you will always have an updated tab panel in each session opening. Maybe the browsing navigation need a pair of buttons in the center bottom of the firefox frame to switch easily between your favorite tabs, without always getting up your mouse pointer to the tabs from the bottom of the page ?

The Tab creation solution could be developed to offer easy visual tab browsing and easy tab setting. With this melting of solutions, you could be able to always recall your last and favorite tabs in each firefox session opening by setting it at your convenience. And this, without install a mod, addon or theme !

 My Idea for history visualization

 My idea of history and bookmark tabs. 

A) BROWSING CHRONICLE –

Additional URL: http://open-elective.blogspot.com/

The idea is to use to translucent spheres and containers to represent points of
cyberspace and groups of points in cyberspace.

The concept applies to bookmarks, history, and groups of.  Live physics makes the solution engaging, natural and easy to learn.

Hi here is my solution to this challange:

I tried to make browsing history more useful for users from a novice to an expert level of experience on internet.

the berief  is as follows:

- In line with traditional Mozilla history, hence easy to learn how to use.
- User can create and customize sessions, and access them on any media like mobile phones, PDAs via weave tool bar.
- User can automate his browsing using sessions.
- usable on small screens.
- Multiple views.

Thanks and please comment what do you think about it and how can it be improved.

We created a service called eyebrowse to that tracks and visualizes a user's web browsing activities.

Our goals are to allow people to examine long term patterns in their web browsing activity and facilitate sharing, comparison, and increased social awareness of browsing patterns among friends. and finally, to form a publicly available corpus of web browsing data for the research community.

Although our goals are more social, we have found a number of visualizations that users seem to find particularly useful when looking at their own web browsing activity. We found that users were most interested in seeing derived information in context of their own web browsing activity and hierarchical views over time to monitor real-world activities such as projects and social interaction.  

For a run through of eyebrows, watch this <a href="http://vimeo.com/6839047">short video</a> or look at the images in this <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/brennanmoore/sets/72157622483187390/">flickr set</a>. All of the visualizations are built in HTML5 canvas or XUL and are open source under the MIT license.

Thanks!

Concept:

Showing history and actions in a timeline view, using strings to represent different properties of visited pages.

My mockups are simple wireframe sketches of what a the Mozilla Weave website might look like. The focus of the concept is the ability to view and organize tabs, bookmarks and history across devices. On the Weave forums users were keen to have more granular control over the information Weave stores. For example, people wanted to be able to share certain bookmark folders from home to work but not others. Not sure if this is the roadmap for Weave but I think this represents a common mental model of the product.

In this concept, users are able to copy/move tabs and bookmarks between devices. They are also able to search across and within devices and filter by tags, how long the page was open, the site the website was launched from, etc. In order to show browser data across devices the visualization of data (tabs, bookmarks, history) is kept small--bookmarks are similar to what you would find in the bookmarks drop-down in Firefox now. Tabs and History represent websites with thumbnail images. I use Tree Tabs so you'll see some nesting in tabs. I also have it History as I think grouping websites by domain would be very helpful.

the problem is the bookmark metaphor.  each piece of information, be it url, page title, password, tag, open tab etc... acts more like a semi-independent token or element. 

therefore, the comp linked to below tries to exhibit the following:

1/ each element should be easily accessible in a global view, so that you can find your desired element via sorting any which way; by name, url, date, or even icon.

2/ as important as the particulate view, each element's connections and the connections between all elements show the 'cloud' of relationships that exist between elements, and by selecting one element you can see the particular network that flows through that element (e.g. multiple history items connect to one password, which has 3 tags and 2 separate bookmarks)

3/ you can always drill down into a particular element, to access a saved password, edit a bookmarked URL, add or change tags, etc...