Artificial landmarks augmented linear control widgets to improve spatial learning and revisitation performance

Revisiting locations within a linear document (e.g., video or PDF) is a very common yet important task that requires both recall and precision from user. Modern linear control widgets (e.g., sliders and scrollbars) provide various navigational features including an abstract mapping of the entire document in the body of the widget. These linear mappings, however, are visually undifferentiated and often make revisitation task difficult. We present two artificial landmarks augmented designs: one that placed arbitrary abstract icons in the body of the widget, and one that added thumbnails extracted from the document and tested those in two types of content (a video, and a PDF document). Our findings demonstrate that augmenting linear control widgets with artificial landmarks can provide substantial benefits for document revisitation and navigation.