Improving Web user experience with document activity sparklines

Abstract

The temporal dimension of the web has been mostly ignoredwhen designing user interfaces for both searching and document browsing.The dynamic nature of the web is invisible to the typical user despitethe fact that most web documents and sites change at a very rapid pace.In this paper we present and describe visual extensions applied to bothindividual web sites and search engines, that capture content activityover time. This idea is implemented with a prototype that processespublicly available web feeds to generate activity profiles and enhancesselected web sites using sparklines. These proposals bring a temporalperspective to the users browsing experience.