We compared two different visualizations of video history in a prototype viewer: Video Tiles and Video Timeline. Video Timeline extends the commonly employed list-based visualization for browsing history by applying sizes to indicate heuristics and visualizing more history items to occupy a full screen. Video Tiles visualizes history items in a grid based layout by following predefined templates based on items heuristics and occurrence. It utilizes the screen space effectively by presenting more history items at a time. These visualizations were investigated against the state-of-art method where participants were asked to share their previously seen affective clips. Our studies show that our visualizations outperform the current method and are perceived as intuitive and strongly preferred to current methods. Based on these results, Video Tiles and Video Timeline provide an effective addition to video viewers to help manage the growing quantity of video. They provide users with insight into their navigation patterns, allowing them to quickly find previously seen intervals; this leads to applications such as efficient clip sharing, simpler authoring and video summarization.

Presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors on Computing Systems in Toronto, Canada, April 2014.