A study of three browser history mechanisms for Web navigation

Finding a previously visited page during Web navigation is a very common and important process. Although most commercial browsers incorporate a history mechanism, when accessing pages that were recently visited, users still rely mainly on the "Back" button. In this paper, we studied the effectiveness of visually enhanced history browser mechanisms on Web navigation. We used three different history mechanisms as the experiment treatments. 21 college students were the subjects of the experimental trials. With a between-subject design, three experimental groups were equally divided according to subject profiles. Users read and completed the given scenario. A quiz was given to measure user performance on the tested mechanism. At the end of the quiz, a subjective questionnaire was given to measure user satisfaction. The results showed that there is a significant statistical difference among the three mechanisms. The more visually enhanced history mechanism provided to be more effective in Web browsing.

1. Introduction

Present browsers lack an efficient method for revisiting web pages. When navigating the World Wide Web (WWW), browser users experience difficulty in finding web pages that they have previously viewed. In fact, in a previous study it was found that 16% of subjects were unable to find web pages that they had recently visited [6]. Additionally, users largely depended on the “Back” button to access visited sites. In the results of the same study, “0.1% of page accesses were through the history list, 42% of page accesses used the Back-Button” for all web pages navigated by subjects.