Main view
All pages within a site, during a given time frame.
Text search
Snapshot History
Summary
This prototype provides a simple way to both visually scan and search for specific words or phrases in your browser history.
Description
The scenario I had in mind was when you want to find a page you've visited, and you remember roughly what the page looked like and some text, but not the page title. I started thinking about screenshots of browser history as a collection of photographs or images that have text associated with them.
When you open up "Your History" you will see thumbnails of your recent history laid out in a grid. The most recent site you have visited will appear in the upper left hand corner.
Initially, you will only see a screenshot for each site that you have visited. So if you have just been browsing through Facebook, there will only be one screenshot of your Facebook homepage, rather than a screenshot of every page you have clicked through.
From this screen, you can:
- Hover over a thumbnail and have an option of either opening the actual site up, or viewing all of your history within that site.
- Use the text search to search both page titles and body text of sites in your history. (I thought that this could possibly be done by using Google to search the text of the selected pages, but I don't know if it would be technically feasible.)
- Use the time frame selector to limit or extend the time range. Since I don't think people generally remember the exact date they visit a particular site, I made this very simple. However, it might also be cool to have some kind of timeline selector that also had visual indication of the level of activity over a particular unit of time, similar to F-Spot.
- Zoom in to make the thumbnails larger and zoom out to make them smaller.
About Me
My name is Natalia Fisher. I am a first year student studying HCI at the University of Michigan School of Information.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.