Serial Anna

Tonight was the U-M SOCHI kickoff for the Mozilla Labs University Design Challenge, a challenge wherein Mozilla encourages students to innovate and experiment in user interface design. After some rapid sketching, we quickly formed teams and developed some of the concepts that had been sketched out.

My teammates and I decided to focus on the problem of “bad” links– links you want to purge from history. During this process, I began thinking about the metaphor of clothing storage. To some extent, I hypothesized, link storage is like storing clothes in a closet– some you use every day, some you never pull out, some you want to get rid of, or never wanted in the first place.

This falls in line with the research that says frequency of visitation falls into 3 categories (described in This Presentation by U-M SOCHI, Slide 9):

• Fast (short term, high volume, sites like shopping)
• Medium (regular hourly checking, Gmail, Facebook)
• Slow (rare but regular visits, personal interest sites)

I did some sketching to see how useful the clothing storage metaphor might be use for browser history interactions. Here’s what I came up with:

Clothing storage sketch

Ultimately, I’d like to work with my group a little more to see if the metaphor is useful. We want to find a meaningful way to get “bad” or unwanted links out of the browsing history.

A major problem of this design is a lack of parameters around “Fast,” “Medium” and “Slow” interactions.