Wander your bookmarks

Why?

You bookmark interesting pages to revisit later. Setting an intention for your future self. But the more you bookmark, the harder it gets to find bookmarks and fulfill your intention. Furthermore, browsers are optimized to create bookmarks quickly. But bookmarks are only useful when you revisit the places that intrigued you. Currently, revisiting a bookmark is a painstaking plod through hierarchical menus.

How does it work?

• You can use Wander as a new tab page, or as a browser toolbar button.
• Click the 🎲 to open a random page from all your bookmarks.
• You can filter down your bookmarks. And open a random bookmark from the filtered results.
• Or simply scroll to view all your bookmarks. Click a folder name to open *all* the bookmarks in that folder as tabs.

What did I learn?

Design around a central idea

Making this extension taught me how to hone in on the core idea and then build the design around it. This project took many forms over the years – as a session manager, as a bookmarks timeline and more. Eventually the idea that stuck with me was about helping fulfill the intention to revisit a place using randomness. Once I had identified this way of looking at bookmarks, it freed me to approach it with my personality and point of view. The design came together naturally from there. Making the icon was a micro-cosm of this process as well, forcing me to succinctly communicate what this was about in a tiny visual canvas.

Using randomness as a design element

Using it over the years revealed to me how surprise and novelty could come from randomness. There were times the randomness brought up a random work doc from years ago, but rather than turning me off, these prompted me to reflect on who I was then. Turns out I didn't *need* an advanced recommendation engine or up-to-the-minute feeds. Knowing that I could revisit these places easily also made me use bookmarks a lot more and accumulate open tabs far less making my overall browsing faster and more focused.

Reflecting on the past

I didn't start it with this in mind, but this project gradually evolved to be a part of my broader artistic practice around the past, grief and how loss lives on with us in our day to day lives. Perhaps the practice of keeping tabs open is a small shade of a deeper desire to hold on in a world that is ever changing. And perhaps, tools like this one, which provide ways for us to revisit and reflect on our past can help us move past that clinging by helping us build rituals of revisiting.