Improving Web User Experience with Document Activity Sparklines S´ ergio Nunes 1 , Cristina Ribeiro 1,2 and Gabriel David 1,2 1 Departamento de Engenharia Inform´ atica Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto 2 INESC-Porto Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n 4200-465 Porto PORTUGAL {sergio.nunes,mcr,gtd}@fe.up.pt Abstract. The temporal dimension of the web has been mostly ignored when designing user interfaces for both searching and document brows- ing. The dynamic nature of the web is invisible to the typical user despite the fact that most web documents and sites change at a very rapid pace. In this paper we present and describe visual extensions applied to both individual web sites and search engines, that capture content activity over time. This idea is implemented with a prototype that processes publicly available web feeds to generate activity profiles and enhances selected web sites using sparklines. These proposals bring a temporal perspective to the user’s browsing experience. 1 Introduction Previous research on web dynamics has shown that web documents change at a very fast pace. Ntoulas et al. [4] have analyzed both content and link structure evolution of web pages and found that, after one year, 50% of the content on the web is new. Temporal information about web documents can be found either as document-based or as web-based evidence. A detailed survey about possible sources of temporal information on the web is presented in Nunes [5]. The use of temporal information in end-user interfaces has already been addressed. In the context of personal information retrieval Dumais et al. [3] found that time is an important information retrieval cue. In the field of web search, Alonso et al. [2] have used timelines to improve the functionality of search applications. They describe a prototype based on the DBLP bibliography collection. Our work addresses the same problem, proposing a different approach to bring temporal data to the web user’s interface. Also, we present a prototype that works with live web data. We have developed interface enhancements that use publicly available web feeds to present content activity sparklines. We leverage on the idea of sparklines, a type of information-rich graphics proposed by Tufte [6]. In the following sec- tions we describe two types of UI improvements — website activity profiles and search engine results enhancements.