Jong-ho Lea

The seamless browser: enhancing the speed of web browsing by zooming and preview thumbnails

In this paper, we present a new web browsing system, Seamless Browser, for fast link traversal on a large screen like TV In navigating web, users mainly suffer from cognitive overhead of determining whether or not to follow links. This overhead can be reduced by providing preview information of the destination of links, and also by providing semantic cues on the nearest location in relation to the anchor. In order to reduce disorientation and annoyance from the preview information, we propose that users will focus on the small area nearside around a pointer, and a small number of hyperlink previews in that focused area will appear differently depending on the distances between the pointer and the hyperlinks: the nearer the distance is, the richer the content of the information scent is. We also propose that users can navigate the link paths by controlling the pointer and the zooming interface, so that users may go backward and forward seamlessly along several possible link paths. We found that combining the pointer and a zoom significantly improved performance for navigational tasks.