Improving Bookmarks
The New York Times has an interesting article describing research into how users navigate the web and catalog sites they visit.
The research is finding that because of the lousy UI of most bookmark managers, many users do not use browser bookmarks at all. Instead, they rely on e-mails to themselves or search engines, among other methods. I’ve seen people use the search engine method, but the e-mail idea sounds completely bizarre. I suppose I fall into the category referred to as “hyperorganized.”
This particular part caught my attention:
“When subjects in their study had the chance to describe a site in their own words and were given the description six months later, they had little trouble finding the site again. Yet in today’s typical bookmark applications, users cannot annotate sites they save.”
For the above reason, it is important that users be able to add a description to bookmarks at the time they add them. Providing a Description or Notes text input area is great, but (to my knowledge) none of the browsers which provide this facility (Mozilla/Camino/Firebird, OmniWeb, iCab) make it available at the time bookmarks are created using the menu item or keystroke. The Add Bookmark sheets and windows used in the various OS X browsers should provide a field for doing so in addition to the name and bookmark folder placement selection boxes.
Taking this concept one step further, OS X Save sheets could provide an interface for inputting a short description of the item being saved. If the mnemonic works for web sites, I imagine it also works for files. The description could be stored in the file’s Finder Comments field. Come to think of it, being able to assign labels while in Save boxes also makes sense…
Meta-data will only be used and useful if it can be easily created!
Not enough time…
Interesting developments in HCI on files and bookmarks management.
Not enough time…
Interesting developments in HCI on files and bookmarks management.
…hate to be continually redundant, but I definitely agree with you here; I’ve been thinking the same thing myself.
Really, if you just take a look at iTunes (which isn’t perfect), and just generalise the data that you’re managing, you have a fairly good model… it’s all about managing a lot of ’stuff’, that you have very personal relationships to (i.e. how you feel about, or what you think of a given item, be it a song, a video clip, a web page, a contact, etc.)
I think elsewhere you’ve talked about rating your bookmarks, again, at the point of creation, and really there is more inherent meta-data that’s not even used, such as creation date, last visited, page author, page description, etc., though Mozilla, OmniWeb etc., do variously make use of some of these.
More and more, I want to see ’smart collections’ in all of the apps I use, as appropriate, so in this sense OmniWeb is promising, as too is NewsMac (though I don’t really like their particular implementation, it’s a little rigid for my liking, at least they allow rating of feeds.)