Wednesday, September 30, 2009

MOZILLA DESIGN CHALLENGE

Am presenting my ideas for "Visualizing Browser History" for Mozilla Design Challenge-Fall'09.

The following are my initial thoughts on Scope for Data Visualization in browsers.


Timeline is the key component that binds data around it and grows continuously irrespective of activity around it. And hence it's treatment as an elastic entity - moulded by various activities to take different forms.

BROWSING CHRONICLE

A spiral timeline (the CHRONICLE) that grows with the number of sites visited, gives a visual measure of the frequency of revisits to old sites, the types of sites –the colour indicating the category, user assigned bookmark icons and ultimately a pattern unique to the user. Assumptions have been made regarding the system's intelligence to understand the content and generate tags from sites visited by user and automatically categorize and assign a color which the user may change if desired.

Displaying thumbnails on mouse over is an add-on while the core is to unearth patterns of usage to the user.Giving bookmarks a shape for better interaction,connection and customization has been looked into instead of the usual textual attribute. The revisit pattern serves as frequency bar when the user visits the specific page and can hence navigate between the history view and the browser window view.




BLOSSOM

Tries to show the user how history unravels,unfolds and BLOOMs-thereby grows with time.At the same time it imbibes the summary view for users who are looking to manage and organize more than recollecting a specific site.The aim is to show the user the gist of his journey through various sites,contents and categories as perceived by him in form of bookmarks and tags.The abstraction is kept doodle-like intentionally so as to glean away from routine data
representation styles.



Thank you for taking time to look at my thought experiments.
Welcome your constructive feedbacks.