Results from the Footprints Project

Abstract

The Footprints project was a multi-version, multi-year investigation into the application of social navigation principles to the problems of assisting web navigation. Inspired by Hill and Hollan’s original work on Readware (1993), we developed a theory of interaction history and built tools to apply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. The guiding principle was collecting, filtering, organising and redisplaying interaction history. We built a series of tools — map, paths, annotations and signposts — based on a physical- world navigation metaphor. This chapter1 presents results from the use of three versions of the system by a voluntary user group over two years and a controlled study with paid participants. Our user study showed that users who had the aid of Footprints were able to get the same amount of work done with significantly less effort in a given period of time.