This is a preprint <strong>for</strong> personal use only. The published paper may be subject to some <strong>for</strong>m of copyright.TaskThumbnail typeStatic LiveThumbR 1 83.3% 42.8%R 2 16.6% 83.3%R 3 16.6% 71.4%Table 1: <strong>Revisitation</strong> results(recall stage of the evaluation).<strong>Revisitation</strong> Results and DiscussionTask R 1 did not clearly reveal a particularly strong benefittoward using <strong>LiveThumbs</strong>, mainly because mostparticipants did not find the requested in<strong>for</strong>mation at thesearch stage. Perhaps the thumbnails (either static oranimated) could have included some navigation-basedcues to better assist participants in answering the questiongiven. However, <strong>for</strong> tasks R 2 and R 3 , <strong>LiveThumbs</strong> wasfound to be superior than regular thumbnails. Concretely,to solve R 3 , the lower part of the three task-relevantthumbnails had to be inspected. Interestingly, some of the<strong>LiveThumbs</strong> users hovered the cursor over the relevantthumbnails and correctly clicked on the right one. Oneparticipant using static thumbnails did miss not having<strong>LiveThumbs</strong> to properly solve this task. To illustrate someof these behaviors, Figure 5 shows two sample mousetracks. No difference between short-term and long-termrevisitors was noticed.Since the upper part of web thumbnails tends to be ratherin<strong>for</strong>mative (mainly because of a site logo or a navigationmenu), it turns out that <strong>LiveThumbs</strong> users may per<strong>for</strong>mslower than users of static thumbnails because, dependingon the task, they may have to wait <strong>for</strong> this part of thethumbnail to become visible. This is particularly true <strong>for</strong>scroll-based animation or if the user accidentally startedthe animation if using PoR, something we observed duringthe evaluation. This suggests that a better design of<strong>LiveThumbs</strong> should include the best of both worlds (staticand animation, see next section) and that users mightprefer having better control over the animation options.Future workLeveraging <strong>Visual</strong> Attention<strong>Visual</strong> change and motion are powerful cues attractingattention to peripheral areas [7]. This has a clearconnection with <strong>LiveThumbs</strong>, and explains why a speeddial of thumbnails that are animated all at once is foundto be distracting. Although the effect of animation onattention is generally not completely understood, as itdepends on the type of animation, user, and task [4], it isa key factor to be considered <strong>for</strong> future work.Further EvaluationWe will consider the effect of using less popular/familiarweb pages, different grid sizes <strong>for</strong> the speed dial, andmore realistic and user-driven search/recall tasks, possiblywith a longitudinal field study. Other avenues <strong>for</strong> futurework include researching what kinds of LiveThumbtechniques are best <strong>for</strong> different types of websites.Redesigning <strong>LiveThumbs</strong>Since the animations we evaluated may hinder the primarytask of web page revisitation either with too slow ornon-continuous animation, a couple of redesign tasks aredevised. On the one hand, we are investigatingapproaches to preserve some in<strong>for</strong>mation from the upperpart of the web pages while animating. For instance, weare considering to overlay the website logo (if any) or thefavicon on top of the animation. On the other hand, wewill deploy <strong>LiveThumbs</strong> as a browser extension, in order toprovide the user with customization options and moreinteraction possibilities. For instance, in aproduction-ready environment, users should be able todecide the behavior of <strong>LiveThumbs</strong> (e.g., set PoR, SoR,animation duration, etc.) that best suits their needs.ConclusionsAlthough limited variations of thumbnail animations wereexplored, valuable feedback and insights have been gained.One important finding is that users are likely to interactwith thumbnail animations on demand. Live thumbnails