Nowadays, the World Wide Web has an high influence on society, as an huge ammount of services are now distributed on-line.
The static-type web documents, from the early days of the web, lead to the now called web applications. Web’s technological evolution allowed the support of desktop-style applications. However, the web navigation paradigm has not followed this evolution trend, with a current design that is close to the one developed in the first web browsers.
A general effort is being made to improve the current web navigation paradigm. Web development companies are developing new forms of interaction and creating challenges that stimulate the arising of new navigation mechanisms.
The current web navigation paradigm lacks organization and relations between web documents, as much as a better integration of the web revisitation mechanisms, which currently have distinct and non-consistent user interfaces.
In this work, it is proposed the creation of a document-oriented navigation paradigm. This paradigm must enable a constructive web navigation, with a strong organization component and automatic document management, that enhances the users’ context. It is also proposed a better integration of web revisitation mechanisms as a way to raise their usability and utility.
A functional prototype was developed as a Mozilla Firefox extension to be the proof of concept of the proposed paradigm. This implementation’s goal was to allow the direct use of the paradigm on the Web.
Usability tests were performed to measure the prototype’s usability and thus assess the proposed paradigm. These tests were performed by ten users, with different experience levels and social contexts, allowing to measure the paradigm’s usefulness to users with different conceptual models of navigation.
The performed evaluation leads to the conclusion that the developed paradigm introduces concepts that raise the utility of some