Posts from — January 2009

Taking our idea of an information worker who frequently uses tabs, let’s think about some of the scenarios that might spark tab usage.

Rebecca, Information Worker

Rebecca is looking forward to her visit to Austin, TX for SXSW ‘09.  She wants to find out about some of the best restaurants that would allow her to experience some Southern cuisine while she’s down south. She starts with a quick Google search: “Southern cuisine in Austin.”  From the search results page, she Ctrl-clicks on several of the links that look interesting to her.  Then she clicks on the first tab, Yahoo! local.  She browses around the map to where the conference is and finds a few restaurants worth considering.  Then she switches to the tab she opened from Yelp.com.  From there, she doesn’t want to lose the original Yelp page, so she opens several of the links in the list of restaurants Yelp provided, which takes her to the inidividual pages on the Yelp site for each restaurant.  As she opens them, she skims through and uses her initial impressions to decide whether or not to further consider the restaurant.  She closes the tabs immediately for restaurants that don’t look so good.  She compares the Yelp reviews with the Yahoo! local results and finds some overlap between restaurants. She sends a few of the links to her friends who will also be attending the conference, then proceeds to close all the tabs relating to her restaurant search, knowing that if she needs to revisit the pages, she can find the links in her e-mail archive.

Meanwhile, she’s also working on a bunch of other projects.  Right now, in her browser, she has 37 tabs open.  While a few of them are personal, most are relevant to the work she’s currently doing; tutorials and documentation for the software she’s learning, an e-mail draft to her boss with a status report, and her RSS feed for work-related feeds.  Her Gmail is always on the left because it is the tab she uses most frequently, and it helps to know where to find it.  Similarly, a few other tabs that are important for her work, such as the main website for her workplace.

Photo credits to flickr user joi – http://flickr.com/photos/joi/2624315128/

This is a list of tab characteristics that could potentially be used to visualize open browser tabs in a meaningful way:

These are other projects that we found which visualize certain tab characteristics:

• Ctrl-Tab
  Shows open tabs in a matrix view in most-recently-used order.
• Autodial 3D
  Visualizes tabs in a 3D space.  More frequently visited tabs being in the foreground and less frequently visited ones in the background.
• Chromatabs
  Gives each tab a unique color based on a hash build from its domain. The rationale is that you can easily recognize certain websites/tabs based on their unique color.

There are certainly more extensions out there that visualize tabs in some way, but this give you a short overview over some noteworthy ones.

From 5 of our interviews as well as Patrick Dubroy’s presentation about “how people use tabs”, we discovered some interesting behaviors and browsing strategies of tab usage.

Tab as a reminder – people tend to leave a tab open when they haven’t done with it. Whenever it was resolved, it would be closed.

Physical location matters – where people are at would affect what tabs they open. For example, people at school would open more course-related tabs, whereas people at home would open tabs more for pleasure.

Open several tabs at once – people tend to open many new tabs of interest at once because they can still stay on the same page and open new pages simultaneously until they finish browsing the original page. They then go to check those new pages.

Tabs in order – most of our interviewees have their Gmail tab all the way to the left, indicating that it is their most important or frequent used site. We guess that may in part be attributed to the title bar changes to indicate if they have new email or chat message. Besides, people tend to manage their tabs from left to right, according to importance. They would drag the important ones to the left and let temporary opened or less important tabs to the right.

Task organization of tabs – people tend to open a set of tabs for certain task and move to another set of tabs for another task. In addition, they would put tabs that have to be switched rapidly close to each other.

The seemingly never-closing browser window – people tend to keep their browser window open more than they used to be for they don’t have to reload pages and the browser nowadays is far more stable than before.

These behaviors and browsing strategies of tab usage will help us gain more insight of how people would like tabs to be visualized, thus facilitating us to present tabs visually in a more useful sense.

To begin our research, one of the essential questions we ask ourselves is, “Who would want to visualize their browser tabs?” In this post, I set out to answer that question as best I can.

The most obvious answer would be people who use browser tabs when they use the Internet, and even more so, those people who use a LOT of browser tabs when they are online.  (”Tab overload,” anyone?)

In a recent poll on Cognitive Daily with over 1,300 respondents, nearly all had multiple tabs open, but only 16.7 percent of respondents said they had more than 10 tabs open.  The poll also found a correlation between age and number of tabs open, and the number of internet celebrities you recognize and the number of tabs open (the older respondents were, and the fewer internet celebrities they recognized the fewer tabs they were likely to have open). The amount of time spent online per week also correlated with higher tab usage.

This points to a high amount of tab usage in information workers and other Internet “super-users” and thus, we are considering that to be our primary user group.  We have interviewed several such people.

Some use the tabs for organizational purposes, for instance, some said that it’s nice to have everything in just one window.  Tabs were frequently left open because of unfinished work that needed to be done on the webpage within, or some piece of interesting information being temporarily saved.

Through our interviews, we identified many such behaviors and browsing strategies.  We’ve also identified various information about tabs that we might be able to use for visualizing them in a useful way.  More about these ideas soon!