Beyond the scrollbar: an evolution and evaluation of alternative navigation techniques

Scrollbars provide a simple way to traverse an information space, but they provide little data about the actual contents of the space. Of the many visualization techniques that have been proposed, few have maintained the simple functionality of the scrollbar while showing improved performance on typical scrollbar tasks. This paper presents two enhancements to the scrollbar, a mural bar and a pile bar, which encode data about the information space contents into the trough of the bar. Results from an experiment suggest that these new devices lead to improved user performance on several common scrollbar tasks.