Multi-Click: Cross-Tab Web Automation via Action Generalization

DOI

Repetitive actions are a common and frustrating part of using the web. Prior work has proposed automating repetitive actions with natural language descriptions, demonstrations, and pseudocode. However, these approaches introduce abstractions that can be difficult to write, evaluate, and fit within web workflows. We describe a new approach, Multi-Click, for simultaneously performing the same action (e.g., clicking or typing) across multiple pages while maintaining the immediacy and understandability of direct manipulation. Users can intuitively select groups of analogous elements within or across windows/tabs (e.g., equivalent elements in different instantiations of a template) and interact with these elements as if each simultaneously had keyboard or cursor focus (e.g., one click propagates to multiple targets). Multi-Click introduces algorithms for identifying analogous elements from structural and visual attributes; techniques for intuitively selecting and visualizing targets; and uses interactive data grids to manage variation in text entry and retrieval tasks.