Visual Web Browser—Creating a 2D Interactive Space for Web Navigation

Information Outlook, April, 2000

We use multiple animation to guide the user between views; they make the transitions naturally and smoothly. The change of the user's mental map can be naturally followed with the animated motions of the updates. In the user's visual sense, there is only one animated image. This greatly reduces the cognitive effort in reforming the user's mental map after each transformation. We also adopt a graphical history tail that contains a sequence of previous focus nodes. It traces the sub-graphs that the user has visited and assists in backtracking through the web graph. In addition, the transition from the picture of one logical frame to the next should preserve the mental map, that is, the difference between successive drawings should be small enough that the user perceives the transition to be smooth.

Remarks

This article introduces a new approach to web browser design. This design integrates three components: the online animated visualizer, the linkage server, and the information filter. The online animated visualizer provides the user a sequence of animated drawings of web sub-graph that dynamically follows the user's focuses in the process of navigation. Each web sub-graph is formed by using the linkage server to search the focus node's neighborhood and using the information filter to remove some unimportant nodes and edges for navigation.

The Visual Web Browser provides users a dynamic visual map to guide their web journey. This map gives the user a sense of "space" while the user is browsing and navigating the World Wide Web.

The practice of Visual Web Browser has shown that it is an effective tool for web navigation and information discovery of any type of large data spaces. The experience of using Visual Web Browser has also demonstrated that it is worthwhile, and is a good technique that can be applied in any sub-area of software engineering and data engineering for the general purpose of information discovery.