I saw a great presentation yesterday by Patrick Dubroy, who presented some preliminary results from his research on how people use tabs in the real world.
[UPDATED: You can now read Patrick’s whole presentation on his blog.]
The sample size was small (22 people) so we should be cautious about any conclusions we draw from this study, but it’s pretty exciting to have any real scientific data at all on this question (as opposed to anecdotes, personal observations, etc.) The study also points in some exciting directions for further research.
The big thing I took away from Patrick’s presentation was that among heavy web users, tabs are enabling new styles of browsing behavior that rely less on bookmarking and less on the back button. According to Patrick, the back button is getting used less and less as the years go by, and for all but two of his test subjects, switching tabs was a more common action than hitting “back”.
This change seems to coincide with the rise of web applications, where a user might spend a long time interacting with data on a single page. Web applications live comfortably in tabs (I always keep gmail open in my leftmost tab, for instance) but did tabbed browsers help popularize web applications, or did web applications help popularize tabbed browsing, or neither?
One anecdote from the presentation really stuck with me: apparently some users love opening multiple links in separate tabs, but they use a laborious manual workaround to do so, because they don’t know about command (or control) -clicking a link to open it in a new tab. This tells me that the feature needs to be more discoverable somehow.
Not The User's Fault 
January 29, 2009 at 5:05 am
I use tabs extensively. While I’ve used IE, Safari, Firefox and its derivatives (going all the way back to Mosaic), I have used Opera almost exclusively for several years on Windows & Mac platforms, largely becuase its tab implementation works the way I want right out of the box – no Firefox extensions needed. And if I need to adjust the interface, Opera allows me amazing freedom in where things are placed in the app window and how various behaviors work.
Incidentally, I’ve always been a keyboard user, resorting to the mouse for specific actions when needed or appropriate, but preferring the speed and lower degree of hand movement keyboard shortcuts allow. I agree with your comment about bookmarking, kind of – rather than a huge list of bookmarked pages arranged in folders, I have a select group of sites arranged in Opera’s “personal bar” toolbar, from which I navigate to where I want to go. I still have the old bookmarks, I just don’t use them. With the widespread availability of high speed connections and google-from-the-toolbar functionality, it’s usually easier to get where I want to go by tapping a few choice terms into a search field than it is to find what I need in a hierarchical list. I do still find myself using the back button – but not by clicking on it. Rather, I use the command+left arrow keyboard functionality instead.
When it comes to moving between tabs, I again turn to the keyboard – Opera has, by default, a nice way to switch between tabs: ‘1’ means ‘go to the tab to the left’ and ‘2’ means the one on the right. Clean & simple.
Tabs have also impacted the way I use websites in a broader sense. When given a page containing several links to pages I’d like to read, rather than clicking on a link to read the page and then going back to the list, I find myself using keyboard & mouse commands to open LOTS of pages into *background* tabs, then closing the original page to move around in my new collection of open tabs. Visiting news websites, wikipedia pages, google results, reddit.com, slashdot, etc. is now a pleasure: I don’t feel like I’m missing links I wanted to visit because I just open things in the background and go back to them later. Every morning, time permitting, I probably visit a half dozen or so main sites, from which a few dozen (or a few hundred) tabs might be opened for reading as I go through the tabs, sometimes leaving things open to read later, other times closing them immediately when they prove to be uninteresting.
The browser is dead! Long live the browser!
January 29, 2009 at 6:58 am
Thanks, Jono — glad you found the talk interesting.
For anyone who wasn’t at the talk, I just put up a much more detailed post on my blog. I posted all of the slides, along with a some notes which cover pretty much everything I talked about.
Jono, would you mind updating your links? Thanks!
January 29, 2009 at 8:25 am
Clicking with the middle mouse button has the same effect as control-clicking.
January 29, 2009 at 9:30 am
OMG! *I* didn’t know about control-click. I knew about middle click, but sometimes I use touchpads, and on these middle click is hard to do physically…
*does a happy dance*
January 29, 2009 at 7:37 pm
[…] dropped the ball and didn’t post my slides anywhere before the talk. Boriss and Jono have already blogged about the talk and linked to my slides, and since it’s already generated […]
January 30, 2009 at 3:04 pm
[…] Brian Jono summarizes this little (in sample side) study of tab use: The big thing I took away from Patrick’s presentation was that among heavy web users, tabs are enabling new styles of browsing behavior that rely less on bookmarking and less on the back button. According to Patrick, the back button is getting used less and less as the years go by, and for all but two of his test subjects, switching tabs was a more common action than hitting “back.” […]
February 4, 2009 at 6:22 pm
[…] talk at Mozilla about his research into how people use tabs has spawned a lot of interesting conversation and reflection about how people use […]
February 5, 2009 at 11:54 pm
[…] Comment on https://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2009/01/28/how-do-people-use-tabs/ by spincycle Posted January 29, 2009 at 5:05 am | Permalink […]
February 13, 2009 at 8:03 pm
[…] not, you might want to check out the summary of my talk at Mozilla, the responses to the talk from Jono and Boriss, or just check out the posts under the “research” […]
February 15, 2009 at 12:50 am
Some people actually like “laborious manual workarounds” as you put it. There is a certain pleasant physicality to moving the mouse around. I use tabs to browse, and I open them by right-clicking and selecting the “Open link in a new window” option.
I also click spell icons in World of Warcraft with the mouse, unlike most raiders who use keyboard shortcuts.
September 23, 2009 at 10:50 pm
This is anecdotal, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt. But I can’t agree that “Back” is getting used less over time.
My observation from something like 1,000 user testing sessions over the last 10+ years is that even when people have navigation (& tabs) available to them they still exhibit a strong tendency to reach for “Back” if they don’t see what they want or wish to backtrack.
The exception seems to be the more savvy web users, who are more inclined to use on-page nav and tabs to move through a site/process.