DiffIE: Changing How You View Changes on the Web

Jaime Teevan, Susan T. Dumais, Daniel J. Liebling, and Richard L. Hughes

Microsoft Research

Information Artifacts Change

Digital Dynamics Easy to Capture

Web Dynamics

January February March April May June July August September

Content Changes

• Number of studies of change [2, 7, 10, 20]• Frequency and degree of change characterized• Visited pages are more likely to change [2]

Web Dynamics

January February March April May June July August September

Content Changes

People Revisit

January February March April May June July August September

• 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]

• 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]

Web Dynamics

January February March April May June July August September

Content Changes

People Revisit

January February March April May June July August September

Today’s Browse and Search Experiences

Ignores …

DiffIE

Changes to page since your last visit

DiffIE toolbar

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]

Interesting Features of DiffIE

Always on

In-situ

New to you

Non-intrusive

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

Overview

HOW DiffIE WORKS

DiffIE

DiffIE Architecture

Web

Cache

Toolbar Component

Comparison ComponentIE

Client Machine

Toolbar

Compare to older versions

Status messageFeedback buttons

See previous versionHide highlighting

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

Comparison Component

• Change• Deletion • Addition• Movement

A

B

D

C

E F

A

B C

D EED

Node has fewer childrenNode has more children, child new

Node has new child, child present

Node has same children, child changes

Comparison Component

• Change• Deletion• Addition• Movement• Highlighted: Additions, changes• Not highlighted: Moves, deletions

Node has fewer childrenNode has more children, child new

Node has new child, child present

Node has same children, child changes

STUDYING DiffIE

Interesting Features of DiffIE

Always on

In-situ

New to you

Background

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)

HOW DiffIE IS USED

Expected New Content

Monitor

Unexpected Important Content

Serendipitous Encounters

Understand Page Dynamics

Attend to Activity

Edit

Attend to Activity

Edit

Understand Page Dynamics

Serendipitous Encounter

Unexpected Important Content

Expected New Content

Monitor

Expected Unexpected

Monitor

Find Expected New Content

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK

• 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

Summary

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

Thank you.

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).

Revisitation Adar, E., J. Teevan, and S. T. Dumais. Large scale analysis of Web revisitation patterns. CHI 2008 (Best Paper).

Relationship Adar, E., J. Teevan, and S. T. Dumais. Resonance on the Web: Web dynamics and revisitation patterns. CHI 2009.

Jaime Teevanhttp://research.microsoft.com/~teevan

EXTRA SLIDES

DiffIE Received Positively

• Feedback buttons– 51% of unsolicited feedback positive (v. 10-25%)

• Experience interview (conditioned on change)– 61% positive– 18% neutral– 21% negative

Reported Experience with DiffIE

Nothing highlighted

Too much highlighted

Unexpected highlighting

… that was important

… that was interesting

… that was distracting

Never Rarely Sometimes Often Always

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