Tab Efficiency Study

• Champion: bosniarocks
• Status: Draft
• Duration: 1 week

Overview

The efficiency of task management in a UI is significantly increased if the user rarely has to pare the tree.

That is, a task manager is most efficient when used to launch things which one is interested in, allows one to switch to things one is interested in, but does not concern one with removing things often, which can be taken as a sign that the UI is not self managing and forcing the user to constantly close items to stay "manageable".

An ideal tabbed browser would manage tabs in a way that one never need think of closing them. In fact a preference could be created to autobookmark tabs into a special folder that have been open and not referenced after a certain amount of time.

I realized that when using chrome I leave many more tabs open for longer than I do in Firefox.

Another good example is the OSX dock vs the windows taskbar. Closing applications on the dock is almost never necessary, in windows its a repetitive task.

Question to Answer

This study should compare tab open to tab close operations over a week and the length of time tabs are left open taking into account the number of total tabs open.

How is the avg length of time a tab is left open affected by the number of tabs open? Do I close tabs immediately if I have 10 tabs open? 20?

Also what is the avg maximum # of tabs open for a user left open for more than 10 minutes.