Many of those who participated in the studies that we read about for Personal Information Management complained that using the "favorites" tool on browser was insufficient because it often does not explain the website for easy future reference. However, a user can rename the favorites' titles.
I was curious how many characters can be stored in a favorites' title so I keyed away to find that 85 characters fit (I don't know how many more than 85 but I did try 100 and that is too big). I wonder how many people use the "rename" feature (and/or are aware they can) in order to summarize a page they want to add to their favorites list?
RE: Rename.
I use and abuse this feature, but mostly for the links just under the address bar in IE 6. It is really just to get as many up there in as few characters as possible. It is like a game! ;-)
I only rename my favorites in the drop down when the page names are ridiculously long.
Amanda
Posted by: Amanda on February 24, 2003 11:47 PMI use the rename feature only when the page is too hard to identify using the name automatically provided. Some peole just use "untitled" as their page title, or sometimes just the URL. Here is an information architecture issue that web site developer should consider when they decide the page title.
In Jones, Bruce & Dumais' article for this week, Keeping Found Things Found on the Web, they mentioned that "Favorites" tool were not widely used by their participants. I personally do not use "Favorites" very often. The pages that I visit on a regular basis are usually already in the drop down menu, so I just go there.
Posted by: zhanglan on February 25, 2003 12:45 AMI rename my bookmarks a lot, either because of length issues or because I want a more descriptive title. I also have a lot of nested folders for my bookmarks to help me keep track of them. I don't go through and clean them out as often as I should; in fact, looking at the "Favorites" folder for IE (which I haven't used in a while) I had 187 files in 18 folders. It's probably more than that now.
Posted by: dcplumer on February 25, 2003 01:46 PMMaking your link names too small often makes them harder to click on (yes, another invocation of Fitt's Law - sorry), but if you're *really* maximizing linklbar space, try putting whole folders full of links and use the linkbar as another pull-down menu.
Note: anyone that does or even *cares* about any of these things is very atypical from the average Web user. See our reading by David Abrams from this week.
Posted by: donturn on February 25, 2003 02:39 PM