DiffIE : Changing How You View Changes on the Web

1. DiffIE: Changing How You View Changes on the Web Jaime Teevan, Susan T. Dumais, Daniel J. Liebling, and Richard L. Hughes Microsoft Research

2. Information Artifacts Change

3. Digital Dynamics Easy to Capture

4. Web Dynamics Content Changes January February March April May June July August September • Number of studies of change [2, 7, 10, 20] • Frequency and degree of change characterized • Visited pages are more likely to change [2]

5. January February March April May June July August September People Revisit Web Dynamics • People revisit on the Web a lot • Over half of page visits are revisits [2, 22] • Over a third of searches are for re-finding [23] Content Changes • Revisitation relates to change • 66% of revisits are to changed pages [2] • 20% of the content changes [2] • Revisiting often motivated by change [2, 15] • Change interferes with revisiting [21, 23] January February March April May June July August September

6. January February March April May June July August September People Revisit Today’s Browse and Search Experiences Ignores … Web Dynamics Content Changes January February March April May June July August September

7. DiffIE DiffIE toolbar Changes to page since your last visit

8. Systems That Expose Web Change • Historical access to pages • Internet Archives (archive.org) • Subscription to change • RSS, Web slices • Monitoring support [15] • In-situ awareness of change • symbols • Dynamo [3], Difference Engine [9], WebCQ [17]

9. Interesting Features of DiffIE New to you Always on Non-intrusive In-situ

10. Overview • How DiffIE works • How we studied DiffIE • How DiffIE is used • Conclusions and future work

11. How DiffIE Works

12. DiffIE Architecture Web Toolbar Component Comparison Component IE Cache DiffIE Client Machine

13. Toolbar Feedback buttons Status message See previous version Hide highlighting Compare to older versions

14. Cache • Web page representation • Leaf nodes in DOM: Hash of text • Parent nodes: Hash of children, appended • Cache multiple versions of pages visited • Small footprint (50KB) • Exact duplicates stored as pointer files • Cap count (only 6% of pages visited >5 times) • Privacy preserving

15. Comparison Component • Change • Deletion • Addition • Movement Node has same children, child changes Node has fewer children Node has more children, child new Node has new child, child present A A B C B C D E D D E F E

16. Comparison Component • Change • Deletion • Addition • Movement • Highlighted: Additions, changes • Not highlighted: Moves, deletions Node has same children, child changes Node has fewer children Node has more children, child new Node has new child, child present

17. Studying DiffIE

18. Interesting Features of DiffIE New to you Always on Background In-situ

19. Methods for Studying DiffIE • Large scale demonstration • Feedback buttons • Experience interview • 11 people (5 female, 6 male) • Interviewed after extended DiffIE use (2+ weeks) • Asked about general experience • Revisited 10 pages (half from today/yesterday)

20. HOW DiffIE is Used

21. Expected New Content

22. Monitor

23. Unexpected Important Content

24. Serendipitous Encounters

25. Understand Page Dynamics

26. Attend to Activity

27. Edit

28. Unexpected Expected Unexpected Important Content Edit Expected New Content Attend to Activity Understand Page Dynamics Monitor Serendipitous Encounter

29. Monitor

30. Find Expected New Content

31. Conclusion and Future Work

32. Summary • Web dynamics important • Change and revisitation common and related • DiffIE exposes change upon revisitation • Caches representations of visited pages • Additions and changes identified and highlighted • DiffIE used in unexpected ways • Some Web content becomes more valuable • Not as useful for sites designed around change

33. Next Steps • Additional ways to display change • Other interfaces: fade, moves/deletes, differences • Just show change: mobile, mash ups • Allow user to subscribe to change • Decide when and what to highlight • Important v. unimportant changes (e.g., ads) • Provide access to unseen change • API exposing change

34. Jaime Teevan http://research.microsoft.com/~teevan • DiffIE Teevan, J., S. T. Dumais, D. J. Liebling, and R. Hughes. Changing How People View Changes on the Web. UIST 2009. Change Adar, E., J. Teevan, S. T. Dumais, and J. L. Elsas. The Web changes everything: Understanding the dynamics of Web Content. WSDM 2009 (Best Student Paper). RevisitationAdar, E., J. Teevan, and S. T. Dumais. Large scale analysis of Web revisitation patterns. CHI 2008 (Best Paper). RelationshipAdar, E., J. Teevan, and S. T. Dumais. Resonance on the Web: Web dynamics and revisitation patterns. CHI 2009. Thank you.

35. Extra Slides

36. DiffIE Received Positively • Feedback buttons • 51% of unsolicited feedback positive (v. 10-25%) • Experience interview (conditioned on change) • 61% positive • 18% neutral • 21% negative

37. Reported Experience with DiffIE

38. Performance • Highlighting shown on page load event • Appears 10s to 100s of milliseconds after load • Does not interfere with browsing experience • Often appears after interaction begins • Notification of delay important