Labs/Test Pilot/Test Proposals/Tabbed Browsing
Tabbed Browsing
- Champion: Limi (limi@mozilla.com)
- Status: Draft
- Duration: 1 week
- Implementation: Not started yet. Will be implemented with Test Pilot extension.
- Data to collect:
Introduction
Tabbed browsing is now the standard interface offered by all major web browsers, and its been argued that the browsing experience becomes difficult to manage when more than a handful of tabs are opened.
In conjunction with our recent focus on tabs and their possible reinvention (see the Summer 2009 Design Challenge: Reinventing Tabs, as well as in numerous blog posts) this study will seek to provide designers and developers additional information and insights to help inform the design of future tabbed interfaces.
Goals
This will be the very first study of tabbed browsing through Test Pilot. Our goal for this study is to understand and design:
- Tab behaviors after people close a tab (approved)
- Ways to manage and navigate among a large number of tabs
- What the distribution of tabs are, wrt. how many people have open, max/min.
- How many people open new windows to group tabs
- How widely spread are sessions? Ex. Google search and new results in tabs
- How long do split sessions survive?
- Behavior around tab dragging and docking (approved)
- Tab selection errors
- T2(tab select) - T1(tab select) < 1.5s
Instrumentation
- Tab open/close hooks are easy
- Tracking "open in new window"(OiNW) and subsequent metrics is not easy.
- Domain overlap
- Lifetime variation in OiNW tabs versus other tabs (expectation is shorter if these are truly speculative opens, preserving the original)
Details
Design question 1 What should be the default tab behavior after users close a tab?
Metrics to consider:
- user actions after close a tab: stay with the tab next to it? or immediately go back to last viewed tab? how long it takes between "close a tab" and "select the previous tab"?
- if users stay with the tab next to the closed one, what's the relation between them? opened through the same tab? within a same domain? these two tabs are opened next to each other in a very short time?
- how many tabs are open when users close this tab?
- any add-ons or settings may influence this user behavior?
- considering both mouse action and keyboard action.
Design question 2
What should be the default placement when users open a tab through a link in the current tab?
Metrics to consider:
- user actions after they click a link within a tab (tab A) to open another tab (tab B): any actions before click tab B? If no action happens, how long it takes for people to click tab? if any action happens, how long it takes for each each action?
- user behavior around tab B:
- percentage: move tab B next to tab A (or any other tabs open through tab A)?
- percentage: move tab B to other position? (relations between tab B and tabs next to it)
- percentage: move tab B and tab A to a new window?
- how many times tab B is moved?
- how many tabs are open when users close this tab?
- any add-ons or settings may influence this user behavior?
- considering both mouse action and keyboard action.
Generic parameters
- how many browser windows/tabs are open when users performing following tasks?
- close a tab
- switch tabs
- drag a tab
- open a window/tab through a link
- Firefox default hot key for above tasks?
- close a tab: command+w (Mac); contrl+w (Win)
- any add-ons or settings may influence this user behavior?
- so far 273 add-on is related to tab behaviors.