User Interface Selection Tracking for Focused Information Retrieval
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Solution Overview
Problem
Users of network-accessible services face challenges in identifying relevant information from large lists of recently viewed items, as existing 'recently viewed' lists do not effectively pinpoint items aligned with their interests, and managing 'favorites' lists can become unwieldy.
Innovation Solution
A network-accessible service presents a user interface that conceals certain information, such as telephone numbers, until activated by the user, and stores records of these selections to display a list of prior item selections that correlate with the user's likely interests, providing a more focused list of recently selected items.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If a network-accessible service provides a comprehensive list of all recently viewed items to help users access information quickly, then the user can retrieve information efficiently, but the list becomes too large and unwieldy for users with voracious content consumption habits, making it difficult to pinpoint relevant items
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts a subset of recently viewed items that are most likely to be of interest to the user, rather than presenting the complete list. This is achieved by monitoring user interactions and identifying items that received significant attention (e.g., time spent viewing, number of activations), thereby reducing the quantity of presented items while maintaining relevance and improving retrieval efficiency.
2Loss of information
If the service presents all recently viewed items to capture user interest, then no potentially relevant information is missed, but the user interface becomes cluttered and the user cannot easily identify items truly relevant to their interests
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by differentiating between various recently viewed items based on their relevance to the user's interests. Instead of treating all items uniformly, the system assigns different levels of prominence or selection based on local characteristics such as user engagement metrics, item importance, or contextual relevance, thereby reducing interface complexity while preserving information quality.
3Loss of information
If the service manually tracks and presents all viewed items, then complete viewing history is available, but the manual task of creating and managing such lists becomes unwieldy as the number of items increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs self-service by automatically tracking user viewing activities and generating the list of relevant recently viewed items without requiring manual user intervention. The service monitors user interactions, identifies relevant items based on predefined criteria, and presents them automatically, thereby maintaining completeness of viewing history while eliminating the manual management burden.
4Device complexity
If the service conceals certain additional information from the main user interface presentation, then the user interface remains clean and focused, but the user loses immediate access to potentially useful information
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by pre-identifying and concealing only those items that are most likely to be of interest to the user, based on prior analysis of user behavior patterns. By using predictive algorithms to determine which items should be concealed versus displayed, the system maintains interface simplicity while minimizing the time users would need to search for concealed information, as the concealed items are those least likely to be needed immediately.
Data Source
AI summary
An approach is described for recording the selections made by a user and then presenting information regarding these selections to the user in various contexts. Each selection corresponds to the user's express request to receive information (such as a telephone number) that is useful in performing a transaction (such as calling a particular business entity).