WildThumb: A Web Browser Supporting Efficient Task Management on Wide Displays
by Shenwei Liu, Keishi Tajima
Abstract
Nowadays the Web and Web browsers have become the most important and
universal platform for people to search, view, process, and exchange
various kinds of information. Consequently, today's users usually
open many Web pages simultaneously in order to perform multiple tasks
in parallel, which makes Web browsers crucial in our daily task
management. However, no existing Web browser provides users with
sufficient support for the management of many tabs or windows of
opened pages. On the other hand, wide displays have become more
affordable and prevalent, while extra space on those displays is not
utilized effectively in Web browsing. In this paper, we propose a new
Web browser interface aiming to support efficient task management in
Web browsing on wide displays. In order to help users switch between
opened Web pages, we show thumbnails of the pages in the extra space
around the currently focused page. In the page thumbnails, we
emphasize distinctive elements in each page in order to make the
selection of the thumbnails easier. In addition, we calculate the
relevance between pages based on users' switching history, and
emphasize pages relevant to the current page by adjusting the size or
opacity of the thumbnails. This further helps users find the
thumbnails of needed pages, and also helps users get the overview of
the page set related to the current task.
multitask,
task switching,
task grouping,
working set,
augmented thumbnail,
site logo,
tab-browser,
window system
Publishd in Proc. of ACM IUI, pp.159-168, Feb. 2010, Hong Kong
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