Improving Internet interaction: From theory to practice

The Internet is a medium for education, entertainment, communication, and personal expression. User behavior has developed three main modalities for using this medium effectively-searching, browsing, and monitoring-which are supported to different degrees by conventional tools. Understanding the nature of the interaction allows us to design and implement a system called Mitsukeru to support browsing behaviors, while retaining the free-form movements between other interaction styles. The system uses agent-based modeling and look-ahead to provide informative yet nonintrusive guidance to the user, and is described in detail.