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Challenges of networked media: integrating the navigational features of browsing histories and media playlists into a media browser
Abstract
One of the goals of the Continuous Media Web project1 is to integrate digital media with the World Wide Web: media documents can hyperlink to and from other documents in the same way that HTML pages do. The dual capabilities of hyperlinking (1) to other documents while viewing a media clip, and (2) into precise time intervals in a media clip, enable greatly improved user interaction with media. We discuss the idea of a novel media browser application, which merges the concept of a traditional media player that presents video and audio to the user, with a Web browser that provides hyperlinking and navigation between networked (media) documents. The particular issue we address in this article concerns the primary navigational features: a media player relies on a playlist while a Web browser uses a browsing history for navigation. We discuss design and user interface issues that arise when integrating these two navigational features in a media browser.
Since the year 2000 a project under the name of "Continuous Media Web", CMWeb, has explored how to make video (and incidentally audio) a first class citizen on the Web. The project has led to a set of open specifications and open source implementations, which have been included into the Xiph set of open media technologies. In the spirit of the Web, specifications for a Video Web should be based on unencumbered formats, which is why Xiph was chosen.
We report on users' revisitation patterns to World Wide Web pages, and use these to lay an empirical foundation for the design of history mechanisms in web browsers. Through history, a user can return quickly to a previously visited page, possibly reducing the cognitive and physical overhead required to navigate to it from scratch. We analyzed 6 weeks of usage data collected from 23 users of a commercial browser. We found that 58% of an individual's pages are revisits, and that users continually add new web pages into their repertoire of visited pages. People tend to revisit pages just visited, access only a few pages frequently, browse in very small clusters of related pages, and generate only short sequences of repeated URL paths. We compared different history mechanisms, and found that the stack-based prediction method prevalent in commercial browsers is inferior to the simpler approach of showing the last few recently visited URLs with duplicates removed. Other predictive approache...
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