Links that preserve and add context
Sources
- TheoryFurnas (1986)
People retain details near their focus and landmarks farther away; similar interfaces can work well for large information structures.
“humans often represent their own “neighborhood” in great detail, yet only major landmarks further away”Abstrak
- EmpiricalHuang & White (2010)
Web users often maintain multiple contexts at once rather than browsing strictly linearly.
“parallel browsing is more prevalent than linear browsing online”Abstrak
- EmpiricalCockburn et al. (2009)
A review of ways to combine focus and context, including evidence about their effectiveness.
“focus+context, which minimizes the seam between views by displaying the focus within the context”Abstrak
Priority
Central to knowledge navigation: stacked panels combine focus and context, while URL behavior, focus, and narrow-screen handling can be measured.
Experiments
- 003Links that add contextCompleted
Findings
Stacked panels kept all three previously opened notes visible and encoded the complete navigation trail in the URL, whereas a single note per page preserved no visible context. Two conditions apply: focus must move to the new panel, or keyboard users remain in the old one; and narrow screens need an alternative such as a title trail, because at 375 px stacked panels leave no previous context visible.