In your browser that is. Do you just start typing into the Awesome Bar and hope that the URL pops up because it was in your history? Or do you scan your bookmarks? Or something else?
One of our labs interns decided to build an add-on called Recall Monkey that would help you find this forgotten information faster.
When we tested Recall Monkey on six new users, we found that all of them used a string of keywords in the search bar and none of them changed the default time range that was set to “all time”. The interface also allowed users to filter with domain names to make the search set smaller, but no one used that feature because it wasn’t intuitive.
We made some UI changes based on some initial feedback. It now shows you which sites are bookmarks, but it doesn’t automatically prioritize them, unless you tell it to. It’s easier to exclude sites from your search and to narrow your search by prioritizing certain domains.
We haven’t run any quantitative tests on this yet, but it’d be interesting to know if the majority of people try to remember forgotten sites by typing in keywords, then setting a time range and then narrowing the search results or if they filter the results by domain name and then put on a time filter.
In any case, you can now use Recall Monkey to recall that website with that podcast on design or that hilarious quote your friend tweeted about.