Group Project

Team Members: Divya Kumar, Kelly Miyashiro, Eric Pan, Karen Au, Bryan Tsao, Jun (not finalized, may be too many)

Our group has had an official meeting to discuss our project idea in detail. We have decided to work on a redesign/improvement of the existing bookmarking web program at Del.icio.us.com. Our main goal is to improve the user experience of bookmarking, by developing a more effective and efficient visualization and functionality for the process. Our group has come up with many ideas, also listed on our wiki: http://wombatsarefuzzy.com/wiki, but hope to narrow down the very large scope of our project vision:

Given the growth of the web-surfing culture, the need for online bookmarking has increased. Websites such as del.icio.us and furlit.com cater to this need improving the surfing experience of millions of users. However it is our observation that their user-interface needs tremendous improvement. We have formulated the goals of our project by understanding the basic functionality of online bookmarking sites and the downsides of their user-interface.

Current Situation

Primary functionality of Online bookmarks Managers

• Allows users to save visited links on the go, by posting the links into their web-accounts
• Customizable tags to help u associate websites names with generic terms (such as email, movies, blogs etc)
• Provisions for sorting links based on frequency of a user's visit to the link
• Provides a count of people who have saved the same website (providing means to collaborate with people of common interests)
• Allows views of popular and recommendable tags to help discover websites catering to user's interest

Downside

• Lack of visualizations and other features that would help a user to identify bookmarks faster
• Tags can be ambiguous, when the user provides different names to bookmarks of the same "taggable" category
• Limits the number of sites that could be displayed in a page, requiring the user to navigate through several pages to find a bookmark to even the most visited sites
• Search provision is either unavailable or unsatisfactory
• Does not display or save images
• No form of organization to categorize or prioritize bookmarks

Project Vision

The scope of the project is very large, with plenty of features that could be accomodated. However, through the course of this quarter, we aim to narrow down and implement the most significant design changes and functionalities. We have brainstormed many ideas, as mentioned below. In the next couple of weeks, we will improve on or eliminate some.

1. Our goal is to design the user-experience, targeting non-tech savvy web-surfers for whom convenience of use is a priority
2. The time spent by a user to identify the desired book-mark should be minimum (even across a potential of over hundreds of links)
3. Frequently visited sites must appear clearly
4. Provisions for searcing across the website
5. Track Freshness: User's favorite websites will be monitored for frequent updates and appropriately pop-up
6. More visualization
7. Provisions for saving personalized searches such as driving directions etc.
8. Provision for saving images and displaying them, possibly as a slide show
9. Load files, so as to eliminate the need to email files to oneself
   
10. Come up with a name of our team and website!

Individual Contribution & Project Interests

I would like to be very involved in the improvement of the information visualization and design aspects, and hope to contribute as a programmer as well. I think that the site currently has a lot of potential, functionality being extremely useful but through a horrible interface. Currently, the visualization is no better than that on a web browser, with the only added benefit of being able to view bookmarks from more than one computer. Some ideas for improvement of visualization:

1. Organize bookmarks into categorical modules of user preference (e.g. pictures, class websites) or by priority or frequency of visit (e.g. to do's, updated recently)
2. Ability to drag and drop bookmarks into different sections of page or site
   
3. Display when bookmark was last viewed
4. Incorporate thumbnails or a more visual form of identifying bookmarks, perhaps rollovers, such that user can find site quickly
5. Display as many bookmarks as possible, so that user does not have to navigate through several pages
6. When tagging, visualize pre-defined tag names/categories/images