Browsing behaviors revisited

After doing an additional round of user interviews and showing them our most recent prototypes, we felt it was important to revisit the different browsing behaviors that we encountered while working on this problem.  The most important take away is that people use tabs and the browser in general in very different ways and it is impossible to find visualization solutions that would fit each of these different behaviors.

To stay aware of the differences in behavior and to check how the different behavior match up with our existing concepts/sketches, here is a list of the most important behaviors we noticed:

The Never-Closing Browser

One browsing behavior characteristic that we heard from nearly every person we talked is that people have their browser open a lot longer than they used to.  Given that it didn’t crash for any reason, a browser that has been open for several days is not a rarity anymore.

Tabs As “Soft Bookmarks” or Reminders

Another type of user behavior we discovered are people that use tabs as reminders or a sort of lighter version of browser bookmarks.  Let’s say you chanced upon an interesting article or website that you would like to check out, but you don’t have time right this moment.  You would like to keep that URL in some form but it is not important enough for you to save it as a regular bookmark.  So, you leave that website open in a tab in the background and you get back to it when you have some time again.  The problem is that this way you can easily accumulate a lot of tabs, especially when you don’t have a lot of time

Browsing Historians

A number of people expressed interest in having a detailed view of their complete browsing history.  Part of this interest can probably be attributed to simple curiosity, but a visualization like that could also enable users to refind tabs they had open at a specific time in the past or in specific combination with other tabs.

Browser Spaces

One strategy to control the problem of too many browser tabs that multiple people are using is to use multiple browser windows organized by tasks.  For example, one window for work-related tabs, one for project A, one for personal tabs, and so on.  However, current browsers do not support this strategy very well, yet (e.g. it is hard to distinguish different browser windows in the start menu).  A concept title “Browser Spaces” which goes into this direction has been presented by Debra Lauterbach at SOCHI’s Browser Design Jam last year.

Opening (Several) New Pages In New Tabs

Another tab related behavior is that some people open many new pages (even from the same website) in new tabs instead of the same as the tab of origin website.  This is also related to Patrick Dubroy’s findings that some people are using the browser’s back button less and less because of opening new pages in new tabs.  A use case where this is very frequent is when opening a handful new tabs from a list of search results (or a list of aggregated news stories).  A big problem with this kind of behavior is that you lose track of the connection between tabs and of which tabs (search results) you haven’t looked at yet.  We are addressing this problem in our fan-shaped Radial Tab visualization.

Overview Over Current Tabs

Some people were not so much interested in a full historic view of their tab usage or a visualization that would help them while interaction with the tabs, but rather a visualization that would allow them to get an overview over the current state of all the open tabs at any time. This would be analogous to the Exposé feature on Mac OS X, which gives you a quick overview of the current open applications. Our ChronoViz concept is aiming in that direction.

Tab Arrangement By Importance

Finally one thing that most of our interviewees were doing in some way (implicitly or explicitly), was to organize their tabs by importance or permanence. Due to this, the most important tabs, which were open the longest and most constantly, ended up on the left side of the tab bar. We think this could be used when interacting with the browser and visualizing browser tabs. The stickiy bar feature in the ChronoViz concept is picking this behavior up and lets the user put the most important tabs into a bar where they would always be accessible at the same location, so the user won’t have to remember where it was.