Tab-ula rasa

Boriss recently jump-started the discussion about tab management with her recent great post — if you're interested in how we deal with tabs, I encourage you to go read it and join the discussion. She deals with the issues of finding the tab you want in the sea of those you don't, as well as mechanisms for organizing tabs around real tasks.

I think it's worth coming at this problem from the other direction as well, crushing it, finally, in something we like to call the pincing crab-claw of good design. Implicit in the question of "how do we help people manage tabs?" is the assumption that people want to or should have to manage their tabs; this is definitely true for some tabs, but I think that fully half of the solution will come through helping people avoid a situation that requires capital-M Management in the first place.

Reduce

Sometimes people have multiple tabs quite simply because they need to have multiple documents or applications open simultaneously. But sometimes tabs are stand-ins for activities that could be supported (better, even) in some other way.

• Applications
  A number of my long-running tabs are applications I refer to over the course of a day: webmail, a calendar, an RSS aggregator, an IM client. And the list of web applications that people use, often in place of traditional "web 0.0" apps, is definitely not getting any shorter. This is bad news from a tab management perspective — it suggests that our lists of perma-tabs will only get longer.

  One way to deal with this this is by getting web apps out of the browser and into their own independent windows, as in Prism. By handing the window navigation task from the tab strip to the OS, we let users make use of the often richer and certainly more familiar set of window navigation tools available there (alt/cmd-tab, expose, taskbars/docks, and so on). Even working almost entirely within a browser as I do, I still find myself quite often hitting Cmd-tab (on the mac) to get back to my email, which is, of course, just in another tab rather than another application. This doesn't make as much sense for transient documents, but for something long running like an application, this can be very powerful.

• An attention queue
  People often use tabs as a kind of to-do list — pages to read, forms to fill, reminders of tasks to carry out. Why as open tabs rather than bookmarks? In part, I think it's because an open tab is less permanent than a bookmark. Especially before Firefox 3, bookmarking a page felt like a commitment and required filing — not exactly right for something you just intend to deal with As Soon As Possible and may need no long-term connection to. It's also because a bookmarked page, while around for later, doesn't have the presence and judging stare of an open tab. An open tab can be an unbidden reminder in a way that a bookmark, hidden until called forth, cannot.

  What can we do to support the "deal with this later" use-case that doesn't contribute to tab-clutter? I've started tagging pages to come back to with the tag "queue" and then, periodically, looking at everything with that tag. It's not an ideal solution, though, because I still have to initiate the reminder process. It helps to remind of what I have to do, when I think to check, but not that I have to do something.
  

Re-use

Quite often, when I try to sift through and clean up my tab pile, I find that I have the same document open in multiple tabs. In part, this is because it's getting easier to navigate to a page again than to find one that I know is already open (which better tab navigation will start to reverse). But in many cases, I'm sure I just didn't remember that I'd opened something previously. Making it easier for people to re-use an already open tab would certainly help prevent the tragedy of tab-inundation.

One early concept for this is an attempt to intercede when we see tab duplication beginning — as a user begins to tell the browser where to go. Some quick idea sketching led me to some variants on putting this information in the awesomebar - more discussion of these in a future post:

(click for larger version)

Recycle

Lastly, some open tabs are documents that you're well and truly done with, but that you didn't close. Metaphorically speaking, you just left it on the floor and walked away, again. Would it kill you to tidy up after yourself?

Amidst the sea of open tabs, though, it takes effort to comb through your tab list for the flotsam and jetsam. To paraphrase something I read somewhere recently, there's immediate benefit to opening a tab but not for closing one. The benefit in the latter case is separated in time from the effort to get it — this is a contributing factor for all clutter, really.

What can we do to encourage or make it easier for people to close tabs that they're finished with? Some add-ons try to lower the effort bar on the triage, by providing an indication of tab age and disuse, for example. What else can we do here?

If you have thoughts or suggestions about these issues, please do get in touch! Other good sources for insightful thinking about the nature of tabs and their management are Aza and Bryan. Update: Andy Edmonds has also written on this topic.

Unit Conversion

Johnathan's last post, with its tip for party planning, reminded me of my favorite Firefox searchbar instant unit conversion:

which leads, inevitably and in the spirit of adventure, to this:

Now to find the right recipe...

Get add-ons in Firefox 3

I used to blog about the Add-ons Manager and the new add-on-getting facilities it provides well nigh constantly. Since those heady post-filled days, though, the manager has settled comfortably into its final form for Firefox 3. Read on for a quick walkthrough of how to use the new "Get Add-ons" tab to explore the world of Firefox Add-ons.

Download Manager in Firefox 3

The Download Manager has changed quite a bit, design-wise, for Firefox 3. Some of the most useful and prominent of these changes come in the form of additional functionality: a number of people have written about the great new ability to pause and resume downloads, whether manually or automatically (due to a computer crash or a laptop put to sleep).

Others of the changes are more subtle, and have more to do with simply lessening the effort involved in using the Manager. As always, improving the fit between human and software requires an understanding of what people are really trying to do — in the case of the Download Manager, people are usually involved in one of two main activities: (1) watching, and occasionally controlling, the progress of their downloads; and (2), finding files (or information about those files) that they've downloaded in the past.

Is it done yet?

In many ways, the best progress indicator is one that you don't actually have to watch. When a quick download finishes, it's useful to see the manager so that you can deal with the file right away. If a download is going to take a while though, people typically won't sit and watch — it makes more sense to get the Download Manager out of the way and get on with something else. It's still useful to have a cue that something is going on and an access point to the Download Manager, though, which is where the download progress indicator in the status bar comes from:

I remember downloading it...

The latter of the two main uses is that of finding files you'd downloaded earlier. To help out with this, we've surfaced details that correspond to what you might remember about the file you're seeking. Much of this information was previously available but obscured — you could see it once you'd found the file you wanted, but not when hunting for the file in the first place. For example:

• The time or date, in a person-friendly format, is listed down the right-hand side of the window for easy scanability. If what you know is roughly when you downloaded the file in question, you can run down that column until you get to the range that's relevant.
• The file name is obviously an important cue as to what a given file is — it's been made a little bigger so as to stand out amongst the other backup information we're now providing
• When the file name is vague (document1.pdf?) or not meant for humans in the first place (xpz243ghb.exe), it can be very helpful to know where the file came from. To that end, we show the name of the site from which you got the file. For me, this is a bit of help that I now find I can't do without.

Once you've found the file you're after, you can open it (double click) or remove it (hit 'delete'), or, if you're after more information, right-click:

Of these options, the one that's new and that I find particularly useful is "Go to Download Page." If what you're after is not the file itself but where you got it, this will take you right there.

But I know what it's called!

Scanning through the list is made more productive now, but searching is even better. Here's an example of how searching, combined with the information we now surface, makes finding a downloaded file much simpler. Say I'm looking for take-out menus — I can just filter on menu:

What's interesting is that few of the filenames themselves contain the name of the restaurant, but I can see which one I'm after because we've listed the site names. These site names (along with all the text you can see on the screen) are searchable as well, which saves me in this situation: I'm looking for a menu from Juice For Life, but their name isn't in the file name:

And there's the file. Happy searching!

Unintended awesomeness

I ran into a very useful and satisfyingly simple use of the awesomebar today that I think is at the edge of what it was originally intended for. I wanted to create a new Google Docs document, so I opened a new tab and was about to start typing some terms to navigate to the site. I stopped, though, and tried out a little experiment:

I typed "new document" into the awesomebar, and there, in first place, was what looked like a promising link. I selected it, and got the following:

In other words, I was delivered directly to my real goal — not navigating to the front page of the Google Docs site, but to the "new document" I was trying to create. What's interesting, and newly possible through the awesomebar, is that I could find the appropriate link. Clearly I'd been there before, but I never would have remembered this kind of interstitial non-manually-typed-in URL. It helps, of course, that the URL/command in question uses actual human-language words.

As a result, I have functionality similar to a "New Document" button in my browser without having Yet Another Button on the screen, and the browser becomes an even more sophisticated intermediary between me and my online life than it was before.

Incidentally, Dria's written a great overview of the Awesomebar in Firefox 3. If you're interested in what else you can get out of this new feature, go read it!