TabViz @ expoSItion!

ExpoSItion Poster

We have our project exhibit in expoSItion, which is an event/competition in the form of poster display and oral presentation of our project. When making the poster for expoSItion, we finally named three of our visualization. We called the fan-shaped view Radial Tabs, the bar chart idea barViz. ChronoViz was still called ChronoViz. We were excited to showcase our ideas and prototypes to employers, prospective students, current students, faculty and staff, who gave us valuable feedback when we presented.

Usually, we start with “do you also have many tabs open?” and get answers “yes!” However, we interestingly found that people define “many” differently. Some said yes with only 6-7 tabs open and some with 10-15. So, when they asked back exactly how many tabs did our interviewees open, they were surprised at the number: 30+ tabs.

Another interesting phenomenon when people looked at our poster in expoSItion is that they looked at the section on people’s tab usage behavior, they went through each one and said “yes, I won’t close tabs until I finish reading it; oh yeah, I will certainly do that; yes, yes, yes……” So, it’s pleasant to know that there are more people feeling the same way as our interviewees.

Some viewers were in the shoe of the developer, i.e., they cast doubts on our prototype, especially the Radial Tabs one because they felt it would suffer from technical problems when building it and be time-consuming. One recruiter from Pitney Bowes said, “when you really have indestructible reasons to convince yourselves that this will really be useful, go for it; otherwise, don’t. Or you’ll waste way too much time trying to implement something useless.”

This experience enabled us to talk to more people about our ideas and get feedback not only from super tab users suffering from “too-many-tab” problem, but also from some general public who usually open 5-8 tabs.