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Tauscher, L. and Greenberg, S. (1997)
Revisitation Patterns in World Wide Web Navigation. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – ACM CHI’97. (Atlanta, Georgia), ACM Press, pages 399-406, March 22-27.
Type: Refereed conference (full paper).
Earlier version: Report 1996-587-07.
Additional materials: powerpoint presentation.
DOI: 10.1145/258549.258816

Download: Pdf

Abstract.
We report on users’ revisitation patterns to World Wide Web pages, and use these to lay an empirical foundation for the design of history mechanisms in web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analyzed 6 weeks of usage data collected from 23 users of a commercial web browser. We found that 58% of an individual’s pages are revisits, and that users continually add new web pages into their repertoire of visited pages. People tend to revisit pages just visited, access only a few pages frequently, browse in very small clusters of related pages, and generate only short sequences of repeated URL paths. We compared different history mechanisms, and found that the stack-based prediction method prevalent in commercial browsers is inferior to the simpler approach of showing the last few recently visited URLs with duplicates removed. Other predictive approaches fare even better. Our results suggest new approaches to managing history in browsers.

Keywords: History mechanisms, WWW, web, hypertext, navigation.