When we further discussed details of the fan-shape View of what opened what, we experience tradeoffs among features we wanted to represent. An important decision was then made: discard the representation of tab age indicating by color. Too many colors would dilute each’s importance though visually appealing, thus we decided not to misuse this significant representational element; instead, we chose to use the size to represent the total amount of time spent on tabs, i.e., more time you spent on a tab, the longer that tab would be. We reexamined how we previously represent what opened what and added a new feature in our visualization: history of current open tabs. Here comes our redesign of the fan-shape view:

As can be seen in Figure 1, the color is now used to represent the current state of tabs: yellow shows tabs recently in use; gray indicates tabs not used for a while; dark gray represents a history of previously opened pages within current tabs. The margin is set in between tabs to show new tabs open, whereas those without margin (dark gray ones) represent the history of that tab.
In addition, we considered the chance that people might open tabs out of the blue, meaning pressing Ctrl+Tab or right clicking “open new tab”. One possible way to solve this problem can be seen in Figure 2.

V2 & V3 represents two totally different tab organization of the fan-shape view from the original one. Clicking on any of them will replace the current fan-shape view.
We wish this view wouldn’t bigger than half of the browser window, which will look like Figure 3:

One problem is still in the face of us: how do we show these tabs’ thumbnail/icon? We think of the regular rectangle thumbanil way to represent them, but not satisfied with it. Hope we will come up with better ideas in the future!

From 5 of our interviews as well as Patrick Dubroy’s presentation about “how people use tabs”, we discovered some interesting behaviors and browsing strategies of tab usage.

Tab as a reminder – people tend to leave a tab open when they haven’t done with it. Whenever it was resolved, it would be closed.

Physical location matters – where people are at would affect what tabs they open. For example, people at school would open more course-related tabs, whereas people at home would open tabs more for pleasure.

Open several tabs at once – people tend to open many new tabs of interest at once because they can still stay on the same page and open new pages simultaneously until they finish browsing the original page. They then go to check those new pages.

Tabs in order – most of our interviewees have their Gmail tab all the way to the left, indicating that it is their most important or frequent used site. We guess that may in part be attributed to the title bar changes to indicate if they have new email or chat message. Besides, people tend to manage their tabs from left to right, according to importance. They would drag the important ones to the left and let temporary opened or less important tabs to the right.

Task organization of tabs – people tend to open a set of tabs for certain task and move to another set of tabs for another task. In addition, they would put tabs that have to be switched rapidly close to each other.

The seemingly never-closing browser window – people tend to keep their browser window open more than they used to be for they don’t have to reload pages and the browser nowadays is far more stable than before.

These behaviors and browsing strategies of tab usage will help us gain more insight of how people would like tabs to be visualized, thus facilitating us to present tabs visually in a more useful sense.