Activity fragmentation in the web: empowering users to support their own webflows

  • Authors:
  • Oscar Díaz;Josune De Sosa;Salvador Trujillo

  • Affiliations:
  • Basque Country University, San Sebastián, Spain;Ikerlan Research Center, Arrasate, Spain;Ikerlan Research Center, Arrasate, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

The Web is becoming a main conduit for our daily activities. When an activity expands across different websites, the user is left alone in the effort to aggregate the resources and services required in carrying out these cross-site activities. This results in a lost of focus, and constant switching among websites. The problem is that these webflows tend to be highly personal and hence, difficult to foreseen. Therefore, we advocate for users to be empowered to define these roadmaps upon the websphere. This work introduces CORSET, a Firefox plugin that lets users create their own webflows in the browser side. A corset is defined as a state-transition diagram, and results in "layer hyperlinks" being superimposed upon the participating websites. The expressiveness of CORSET is validated against four webflow patterns: the hub-and-spoke pattern, the guided-tour pattern, the parallel pattern and the interruption pattern. The benefits include (1) mitigation of activity fragmentation, (2) consolidation of webflow knowledge that is now amenable to sharing, (3) reduction in the number of clicks, and (4), alleviation of waiting times through page pre-load.