LiveThumbs: a visual aid for web page revisitation

One problem web users often face is that of remembering which previously visited page is likely to contain some particular piece of information they are now interested in. To ease this revisitation task, we propose a novel approach: using "live" thumbnails, or small video-like animations of a web page. Our approach is grounded on a two-fold notion: (1) live thumbnails should be more informative than their static counterparts, and (2) live thumbnails can help the user disambiguate among perceptually similar pages. We evaluate a proof-of-concept prototype with 13 users. Preliminary results show that our approach has an interesting potential to enhance web page revisitation in a visually compelling way.