I want to find out how people use and manage tabbed browsing. To do it, I need your help answering this questionnaire. It has only 7 questions and shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to answer. Thanks for your time :)
THIS SURVEY IS NO LONGER ACTIVE
Hi, my name is Luz Caballero. I'm a Postgraduate Design Engineer at Eindhoven University of Technology.
Max number of tabs open is a bit low. I know people having hundreds of them open…
I know, I’m one of them :) Actually the reason I chose these ranges is because I want to find out how many people have a number of tabs that can be kept in their short term memory: up to 6 can surely be stored that way; 6 to 12, maybe; more than 12, definitely not. Also, these ranges determine the choices of interface models that can be used to manage tabs (at least for the ones I have in mind). I also wanted to keep the options short because I’m planning to do some data mining on the results to see if I can get some interesting usage patterns and too many options would make it messy.
edit: btw, “more than 12″ is not a maximum number ;)
Your form seems skewed towards those who don’t really use a lot of tabs. In my normal saved session I usually have 4-500 tabs open, sometimes more. While this is admittedly more than 12, it signifies a completely different way of working than that of people relying on bookmarks etc.
If this something you intend to study, I would recommend you take this group of users into consideration, as I know I am far from the only one with a three figure number of tabs open at any given time.
Well, I have to admit that my choice of ranges has been very controversial and you’re not the first person to tell me my questionnaire is wrong :S The thing is I only care about those ranges because I’m trying to find patterns in management strategies (how tabs are organized and retrieved) and the number of tabs. These ranges delimit your ability to use short term memory in your strategy (up to 6 can surely be stored in your STM; 6 to 12, maybe; more than 12, definitely not), that’s why 20 or 100 is the same to me (for this purpose). This questionnaire is not about knowing how many tabs people have, I don’t care about that because I don’t want to design for the number of tabs people have: I want to design for infinite tabs (ideally). On the other hand, I have to admit that one of the first rules (Ux-wise) when designing a questionnaire is to make your users feel that they could freely express their opinion on whatever you’re asking, and I’ve failed at that. Lesson learned :)
In regards to freely expressing…
I actually have some settings to make the tabs self-organising, which influences a bit both my strategies for looking for them, and how much I manually reorganise them.
Are the results available somewhere? I would be interested to see… (even given the usual disclaimers about voluntary surveys etc…)
I’m working on analyzing the results. I’ve managed to find 4 different clusters of users based on their behavior and as soon as I have time I plan to write about that. I’m also working on a new paradigm to replace tabs(or the current version of them) and debating whether I want to present that in the Mozilla labs design challenge or send an email to a friend at Opera about that (my heart is with Opera). But you’ll definitely be able to read about that soon :)