Browsing by Author "Kaasten, Shaun"

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    CONTRASTING STACK-BASED AND RECENCY-BASED BACK BUTTONS ON WEB BROWSERS
    (2000-09-14) Greenberg, Saul; Ho, Geoffrey; Kaasten, Shaun
    People frequently use the ubiquitous Back button found in most Web browsers to return to recently visited pages. Because all commercial browsers implement Back as a stack, previously visited branches of the tree are pruned; this means that people can quickly navigate back up the tree. The problem is that previously seen pages on alternate child branches are no longer reachable through Back. An alternate method is to implement Back on a recency model, where all visited pages are placed on a recency-ordered list with duplicates removed. This means that all previously seen pages are now available via Back. Because advantages and trade-offs exist in both methods, we performed a study that contrasted how people used stack vs recency-based Back. We found that people have a naïve mental model of how the conventional stack-based Back works, typically perceiving it as a recency list. People are also poor predictors of what pages will be displayed with both types of Back buttons. Finally, people seem evenly split over their preference of a stack vs recency-based Back button.
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    GROUPLAB AT SKIGRAPH
    (2000-03-21) Boyle, Michael; Kaasten, Shaun; Rounding, Michael; Tam, James; Zanella, Ana; Greenberg, Saul; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Maurer, Frank
    The Western Computer Graphics Symposium, nicknamed 'SkiGraph', is an annual professional meeting comprising mostly graphics researchers and their graduate students from Western Canada. In 2000, several Western Canadian researchers in Human Computer Interaction: Saul Greenberg (U.Calgary), Carl Gutwin (U. Saskatchewan), Kori Inkpen (Simon Fraser) and Sheelagh Carpendale (U. Calgary) agreed to use Skigraph as a way to get themselves and their graduate students together, where students would present papers describing their research. Because it was important for all graduate students to share their ideas, the papers written could range from identification of research areas and tentative proposals of research problems all the way to detailed results from mature work. This research report collects five research papers by students at Grouplab to SkiGraph (Grouplab is the laboratory for human computer interaction research at the University of Calgary). The papers are listed below. In all cases, the students are the first author followed by faculty members who have supervised or contributed to the work in one way or another. Individual papers may be cited directly by including the following information.
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    Integrating back, history and bookmarks in web browsers
    (2001) Kaasten, Shaun; Greenberg, Saul
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    INTEGRATING BACK, HISTORY AND BOOKMARKS IN WEB BROWSERS
    (2000-12-06) Kaasten, Shaun; Greenberg, Saul
    Most Web browsers include Back, History and Bookmark facilities that simplify how people return to previously seen pages. While useful, these three facilities all operate on quite different underlying models, which undermines their usability. Our alternative revisitation system uses a single model of a recency-ordered history list to integrate Back, History and Bookmarks. Enhancements include: Back as a way to step through this list; implicit and explicit 'dog-ears' to mark pages on the list (replacing Bookmarks); searching/filtering the list through dynamic queries; and visual thumbnails to promote page recognition.