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!

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/

To begin our research, one of the essential questions we ask ourselves is, “Who would want to visualize their browser tabs?” In this post, I set out to answer that question as best I can.

The most obvious answer would be people who use browser tabs when they use the Internet, and even more so, those people who use a LOT of browser tabs when they are online.  (”Tab overload,” anyone?)

In a recent poll on Cognitive Daily with over 1,300 respondents, nearly all had multiple tabs open, but only 16.7 percent of respondents said they had more than 10 tabs open.  The poll also found a correlation between age and number of tabs open, and the number of internet celebrities you recognize and the number of tabs open (the older respondents were, and the fewer internet celebrities they recognized the fewer tabs they were likely to have open). The amount of time spent online per week also correlated with higher tab usage.

This points to a high amount of tab usage in information workers and other Internet “super-users” and thus, we are considering that to be our primary user group.  We have interviewed several such people.

Some use the tabs for organizational purposes, for instance, some said that it’s nice to have everything in just one window.  Tabs were frequently left open because of unfinished work that needed to be done on the webpage within, or some piece of interesting information being temporarily saved.

Through our interviews, we identified many such behaviors and browsing strategies.  We’ve also identified various information about tabs that we might be able to use for visualizing them in a useful way.  More about these ideas soon!