This paper presents results of a long-term client-side Web usage study, updating previous studies that range in age from five to ten years. We focus on three aspects of Web navigation: changes in the distribution of navigation actions, speed of navigation and within-page navigation. “Navigation actions ” corresponding to users ’ individual page requests are discussed by type. We reconfirm links to be the most important navigation element, while backtracking has lost more than half of its previously reported share and form submission has become far more common. Changes of the Web and the browser interfaces are candidates for causing these changes. Analyzing the time users stayed on pages, we confirm Web navigation to be a rapidly interactive activity. A breakdown of page characteristics shows that users often do not take the time to read the available text or consider all links. The performance of the Web is analyzed and reassessed against the resulting requirements. Finally, habits of within-page navigation are presented. Although most selected hyperlinks are located in the top left corner of the screen, in nearly a quarter of all cases people choose links that require scrolling. We analyzed the available browser real estate to gain insights for the design of non-scrolling Web pages.

This paper presents the design and user evaluation of SmartBack, a feature that complements the standard Back button by enabling users to jump directly to key pages in their navigation session, making common navigation activities more efficient. Defining key pages was informed by the findings of a user study that involved detailed monitoring of Web usage and analysis of Web browsing in terms of navigation trails. The pages accessible through SmartBack are determined automatically based on the structure of the user’s navigation trails or page association with specific user’s activities, such as search or browsing bookmarked sites. We discuss implementation decisions and present results of a usability study in which we deployed the SmartBack prototype and monitored usage for a month in both corporate and home settings. The results show that the feature brings qualitative improvement to the browsing experience of individuals who use it.

Several years of research suggest improvement is needed in how people return to their previously visited Web pages. Web page revisitation is one of the most frequent actions in computer use, so any interface improvements in this area can have a very large effect. Five categories of revisitation research are involved: 1) Characterizations of user behavior; 2) System models of navigation and their impact on the user's understanding; 3) Interface methods for increasing the efficiency of the Back button; 4) Alternative system models for navigation; and 5) Alternative methods for presenting Web navigation histories. Revisitation is a dominant activity, with an average of 80% of page visits being to previously seen pages. The Back button is heavily used, but poorly understood.

Our work examines Web revisitation patterns. Everybody revisits Web pages, but their reasons for doing so can differ depending on the particular Web page, their topic of interest, and their intent. To characterize how people revisit Web content, we analyzed five weeks of Web interaction logs of over 612,000 users. We supplemented these findings by a survey intended to identify the intent behind the observed revisitation. Our analysis reveals four primary revisitation patterns, each with unique behavioral, content, and structural characteristics. Through our analysis we illustrate how understanding revisitation patterns can enable Web sites to provide improved navigation, Web browsers to predict users ’ destinations, and search engines to better support fast, fresh, and effective finding and re-finding.

This paper presents results of an extensive long-term clickstream study of Web browser usage. Focusing on character and challenges of page revisitation, previous findings from seven to thirteen years ago are updated. The term page revisit had to be differentiated, since the recurrence rate—the key measure for the share of page revisits—turns out to strongly depend on interpretation. We identify different types of revisitation that allow assessing the quality of current user support and developing concepts for new tools. Individual navigation strategies differ dramatically and are strongly influenced by personal habits and type of site visited. Based on user action logs and interviews, we distinguished short-term revisits (backtrack or undo) from medium-term (re-utilize or observe) and long-term revisits (rediscover). We analyze current problems and provide suggestions for improving support for different revisitation types.

The selectable lists of pages offered by web browsers' history and bookmark facilities ostensibly make it easier for people to return to previously visited pages. These lists show the pages as abstractions, typically as trtmcated rifles and URLs, and more rarely as small thumbnail images. Yet we have little knowledge of how recognizable these representations really are. Consequently, we carded out a study that compared the recognizability of thumbnails between various image sizes, and of titles and URLs between various string sizes. Our results quantify the tradeoff between the size of these representations and their recognizability. These findings directly contribute to how history and bookmark lists should be designed.

Web navigation relies heavily on the use of the `back' button to traverse pages. The traditional back button suffers from the distance and targeting issues that govern Fitts' Law. An alternative to the button approach is the use of marking menus---a gesture based technique shown to improve access times of commonly repeated tasks. This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a gesture-based mechanism for issuing the back and forward commands in web navigation. Results show that subjects were able to navigate significantly faster when using gestures compared to the normal back button. Furthermore, the subjects were extremely enthusiastic about the technique, with many expressing their wish that "all browsers should support this". Subjective measures also showed significantly higher ratings for the gesture system over the back button. Finally, subjects found the `flick' gesture easy to learn.

Monitoring occurs when users return to previously viewed web pages to view new or updated information. While tools exist to support web-based monitoring, we know little about the monitoring activities users engage in and the nature of the support needed. We have conducted 40 semi-structured interviews in order to better understand the types of information users monitor and the characteristics of different monitoring activities. Using the data collected during the interviews, we characterized monitoring as an activity within six web information tasks: Browsing, Communications, Fact Finding, Information Gathering, Maintenance, and Transactions. The results of our study

This paper describes the evaluation of a `temporal' alternative to the normal `stack-based' behaviour of Back and Forward. The main difference of the temporal scheme is that it maintains a complete list of previously visited pages. The evaluation compares the efficiency of the stack and temporal schemes in an `out of the box' scenario in which participants were asked to use a `new' version of a commercial browser without any explanation of the presence or absence of new features. This scenario allows us to predict the likely usability impact if commercial browsers were released supporting the temporal scheme. The results showed that the relative efficiency of the two schemes differed across different types of navigational task. In particular, the temporal system poorly supported backtracking to parent pages, but performed better for more distant navigation tasks. The temporal scheme also caused extreme usage patterns, with the subjects either solving tasks very efficiently or very inefficiently, depending on whether they used the Back menu. This observation indicates that adaptations of the temporal system that improve the effectiveness of the Back menu may enhance web navigation

Although search engines are playing an increasingly important role in users ’ Web access, our understanding is still limited regarding the magnitude of search-engine influence. For example, how many times do people start browsing the Web from a search engine? How much percentage of Web traffic is incurred as a result of search? To what extent does a search engine like Google extend the scope of Websites that users can reach? To study these issues, in this paper we analyze a real Web access trace collected over a period of two and half months from the UCLA Computer Science Department. Our study indicates that search engines influence about 13.6 % of the users ’ Web traffic directly and indirectly. In addition, our study provides realistic estimates for certain key parameters used for Web modelling. 1.