Fan-Shaped view of what opened what

After reviewing all of our interview notes, trying some existing extensions of tabs, conducting literature review on tab usage as well as browsing strategy, we came up with this idea: Fan-Shaped View of what tab opened what tab (See Figure 1).

As can be seen, Figure 1 shows hierarchical browsing history of recently open tabs. For example, from the black tab in the lower left corner, two blue tabs were opened; from the lighter blue tab, three green tabs were opened. This view makes it clear in terms of what opened what; however, the facing problem would be people’s browsing behavior, such as lots of tabs were opened at once or a flat hierarchy of open tabs. Another challenge lies behind this view would be the shape of thumbnail/icon, which might become unrecognizable due to metamorphosis.

In addition to what tab opened what tab, there is another phase that can be revealed in Figure 1, i.e., the tab age. Color played an important role in this fan-shaped view, indicating the length of tab opened over time. Besides, according to our interviews, they tended to put the more important ones to the left, thus the color in this view of the same hierarchy would be gradient.

After we came up with this idea, we further considered some details of this view, such as what would happen if a tab has been closed and how it might fit in browser. As shown in Figure 2, if a tab has been closed, tabs of the next hirarchy would fill up its space. Also, this view could be located at the lower left corner of users’ browser window, when hovering on the corner, it would then show up.

A more advanced consideration would be incorporating the visualization of the viewing time, i.e., the length of each tab, as revealed in Figure 3.

These ideas are in its initial stage, waiting for more thorough deliberation to become riper. Hopefully, we would get some recommendations or critiques about whether it is useful or practical enough to implement.

What do you think?