The worldwide web is an invaluable resource
for satisfying the information needs of many users.
However, current browsers, such as Netscape's Navigator,
show users only one page at a time.
Researchers are developing alternatives,
such as the WebBook, which uses a three-dimensional metaphor.
This comes from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Another approach is DecScape, from the Digital Equipment
Corporation's systems Research Center.
Our approach based on the elastic windows strategy
enables users to manipulate multiple windows at one time.
They can open a group of windows and organize them
in a hierarchical way that accommodates their changing
information needs.
Let's take a look.
Here I am at the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory's
main page.
It has links to projects, faculty, staff, and students,
available reports and products, and related organizations.
When I click on the left description link,
its page opens on the right next to-- within the HCIL main page.
Clicking on the Research Project Description's link
replaces the page on the right.
Since I'm going to spend some time on the research project,
I resize that page, which shrinks the contents
of the HCIL main page.
First, to see an overview of all the current projects,
I select all six links, and open them with a single click.
These pages open side by side within their parent page.
Although the text is small, it gives me a good preview
of what is in it.
Let me resize this window.
To see more of the project pages,
I can resize them on both sides.
The other projects are still visible.
Though, they are scaled down.
Now I scroll down on the elastic window's page
to see the project participants.
Let me open them as well.
Here we are, my page and Ben's page here.
As you can see, I now have four levels
of pages visible at once--
HCIL main page, Research Project Description page,
project pages, and the two participants' pages
of elastic windows project.
Keeping multiple levels gives rapid access
to pages at different levels.
The elastic windows browser is flexible in terms
of page organization.
It's possible to restructure the pages by efficient multi-window
copy and move operations.
For example, I can take these three pages
and move them above the project descriptions
by applying to operation on the top level page.
I can also focus on the elastic windows project page
by maximizing all three pages with a click to this corner.
Let's go back and see how to create a hierarchicon for all
the research project pages.
Let me first open a new window as the old window.
And then create a hierarchicon of the research project pages.
And then active image of all the project pages.
By clicking on the hierarchicon, I
can browse through a number of pages quickly.
In this demonstration, we focused on three features
of elastic windows--
hierarchical windows to provide an organization
to web pages, multiple window operations
to examine multiple pages and to reorganize them on the screen
efficiently, and hierarchicons to provide quick access
to pages.
Our experiment with 12 computer science users
demonstrated the advantages of elastic windows
in personal role management tasks.
We intend to continue our usability testing for the web
browser and refine the prototype.