Web montage

Despite the connotation of the words "browsing" and "surfing," web usage often follows routine patterns of access. However, few mechanisms exist to assist users with these routine tasks; bookmarks or portal sites must be maintained manually and are insensitive to the user's browsing context. To fill this void, we designed and implemented the montage system. A web montage is an ensemble of links and content fused into a single view. Such a coalesced view can be presented to the user whenever he or she opens the browser or returns to the start page. We pose a number of hypotheses about how users would interact with such a system, and test these hypotheses with a fielded user study. Our findings support some design decisions, such as using browsing context to tailor the montage, raise questions about others, and point the way toward future work.