I'm David Little, a user experience researcher and designer

Weave: visualising browser data: part 2

Posted: September 25, 2009

Mozilla’s Web Weave UI design challenge seeks to find solutions to the issue of visualising browser data accumulated across a number of devices. This is part 2 of an article which outlines a potential solution to some of the issues raised. It covers the visualisation of tabs, accounts and preferences.

Please read: part one: introduction, bookmarks and browsing history first.

Tabs

Visualising tab history across a number of devices is possibly a little more challenging than considering bookmarks and general browsing history. Tabs can be open on any number of the user’s devices so one obvious question to be considered is how to arrange this information.

The tabs visualisation stays with the main visual metaphor, with history broken down per tab per device. This assumes the user has some way of adding and deleting participating devices — e.g. a copy of Firefox at home, or another browser running on another computer such as a work PC, laptop or mobile browsing device.

Tab data includes the title of the page being viewed and the tab history. The visualisation displays a thumbnail of the currently open page and previously visited pages. There should be a straightforward way for users to open this on their current device (and possibly all tabs open on other devices), and to save to bookmarks (or if the site is already stored as a bookmark to easily see this).

Views may change slightly depending on how the data is sorted — for instance, if the list were sorted by device name, then the displayed metadata could include information about the device the site was initially opened on.

Accounts (credentials)

Whilst it might be useful for users to synchronise account data across a number of devices, it is also the type of data which lends itself least readily to being visualised; in fact it is not appropriate to visualise data such as passwords.

In this model, sites with stored credentials are again presented as browsable thumbnails lending the user the ability to log in directly to protected sites. Some sites may offer API functionality which allows users to manage their credentials via Weave, but the majority will require the user to visit them in order to do so. Any changes to credentials would need to be synchronised immediately in Weave.

Preferences

Firefox preferences include a number of different options, the more obvious being browser home page, or Firefox persona. Some of this information may be Firefox-specific, other less so (e.g. home page). The visual metaphor can still be used, employing site thumbnails for selected home page or a visual representation of the selected persona. It could also be useful for users to be able to export the relevant parts of this information for use with other browsers if it cannot be directly applied (e.g. for Internet Explorer, Safari or Chrome); similarly options should be available to import data from a file generated by another browser or to be accessed via Firefox’s preferences menu, providing an option to pull the information directly in from Weave.

Summary

The model presented is quite simple and does not attempt any advanced data visualisation. Instead it uses models of organisation and interaction that users may be familiar with from using other social networking / asset organising websites. It is particularly influenced by models for organising visual information, for instance Flickr’s model of managing photo metadata.

‹‹ More writing