Bar chart idea

We’ve begun brainstorming on paper about how best to show information about tabs that people would want to interact with, especially if it would help them navigate their existing tabs.

Inspired by a comment from one of our interviewees about wanting to see his history of tab usage, i.e. number of tabs open over time, I started out with sketching a simple bar chart that shows a user’s history of tab usage over a week:

From there, I thought, what about showing more detail, or only the currently open tabs? So I narrowed my focus to thinking about a single day, with a focus upon tabs that are currently open.

My next sketch looked like this:

The main idea behind this is to show the duration of each tab being open by how wide it is and the height of the stack indicates how many tabs, roughly, are open.  If you close a tab, the other tabs stacked on it would drop down.  Colors could indicate the domain or site that a tab is on.  Hovering over a particular bar could show you more information, including a thumbnail.  In the example shown, I have included all tabs over a day, but you could restrict it to only currently open tabs.  You could possibly expand or contract the timeline.

I’ve thought about several ways for accessing a view of the information like this, including having it be on a separate screen (keyboard or some other action would get you thene) or even possibly trying to smoosh it into what is now the area in which you see tabs.  The bars would likely become lines in the latter case, and hovering over it would give the viz in more detail.

This is just one rough idea that came out when I started sketching.  Kerry and Jakob both sketched some really cool ideas over the past few days too, and they’ll be posting those here soon.  Over the next week and a half we’ll be refining these ideas or coming up with new ones to present to our class for feedback.  Any blog readers are welcome to weigh in, too!