Variety versus Familiarity
The notion of bookmarks, or favorites, seems to be part of every web browser I’ve ever seen. And yet, as Scott Berkun puts it, “favorites are dumb as rocks“. They’re shortcuts that many people use to return to sites they’ve visited before, but there are other ways to do that, too. You can use your history list, in our browser you can use automatic bookmarks (”persistent history”, sort of), or you can do something I’ve seen in several usability tests: remember (or bookmark) one site that you know will lead you to the other sites you really want.
This last strategy is interesting because it quickly illustrates something about how people use some bookmarks — they don’t want to go the exactly the same site; they want new information that fits the pattern they recognize from their previous visit. You don’t want to read the same news story about the large ball of twine discovered in the arctic, but you liked the general topic, the presentation, the writing, and so forth. To use a newspaper as a metaphor, you might have a favorite paper (the Morning Spew, for example), and always read the Twine Insights department on page 13, but you don’t want to read the November 21 edition over and over.
Website designers face this issue constantly: users want variety within a familiar pattern or framework. At the level of browser design, we face the same thing. The content can be infinitely variable, but the “holder” of the content — the browser — stays very familiar. And yet, as we add new features and improve old ones, the browser must provide variety as well.
Different people, of course, have different desires for variety and familiarity in a browser. And that’s yet another level of design challenge: providing individual variety within a broadly familiar framework. At the moment we’re basically limited to changing the display properties of individual pages and the general settings of the browser itself. This is very similar to desktop browsers. I’m not sure, though, that this model is going to be viable much longer. People use browsers in enormously different ways, and we’re going to need to revisit the balance between variety and familiarity in new ways.
