Adaptive timeline interface to personal history data

Abstract

As the growth of stored personal digital information, such as photographs and emails, is continuously increasing, new tools for browsing and searching are needed. We introduce an intelligent mobile information access tool for personal data. The data are presented in an adaptive timeline where the displayed items function as search cues. The novelty is that the visualization is dynamically changed to emphasize relevant items, which makes them easier to recognize and select. The relevance is inferred during usage of the system from user feedback. In a user study, the dynamic timelinebased interface on a mobile device was shown to require less effort than conventional textual search.

Learning History with Timelines: Use Cases, Requirements and Design

“…Furthermore, a metaphor of the timeline provides a special searching interface which might be considered as an obvious implementations of the concept of temporally-oriented non-navigational searching: users are open [8]. What is more, people often prefer browsing over direct search even if the search target is known: "the interface intelligently emphasizes potentially relevant items on a timeline, so that an item can easily be recognized and selected for further inspection" [9].…”