Using tabs – A scenario

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/