Treemap-based website navigation for non-hierarchical, interlinked sites: the trackback map

ABSTRACT

Typically, the navigation area of a website is organized as a hierarchical menu of pages and subpages. For some types of websites, such as blogs, this is not a suitable choice: The importance of blog articles changes dynamically, e.g. depending on their age or the amount of public interest they generate. Navigation to other blogs via links to related articles (so-called "trackbacks") plays an important role, both to find related content and to estimate the relevance of an unknown blog based on the reputation of the blog that links to it. In this paper, we propose a new, interactive type of navigation area which addresses the special needs of websites with a flat hierarchy that link to related sites. The Trackback Map relies on a treemap to visualize the relative importance of individual articles on a blog at a single glance. By zooming into the map, the user can reach articles on other blogs that link to the current blog's article, or (to any depth) articles that link to those articles. A prototype of the concept has been implemented as a WordPress plugin. In a user study, it is compared to established navigation concepts, e.g. a tag cloud.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia

Keywords:
Ajax, WWW, blog, navigation, trackback, treemap, weblog