The use of tabs in a web browser is one of these outdated concepts that we would do well to get rid of. The reason is that tabs are unable to properly organize information. A new study suggests that tabs can cause people to be flustered as they try to keep track of every website
Tabs
Introduced in the early 2000s, tabs are now included on all major web browsers, and most users have had access to them for a little over a decade
- Most people use tabs for the short-term storage of information
- Some keep tabs that they know they’ll never get around to reading
- Others use them as a sort of external memory bank
You suffer from tab overload
Trying to use tabs this way can cause a number of problems
- A quarter of the interview subjects reported having a computer or browser to crash because they had too many tabs open
- People can become emotionally invested in the tabs
- We have a tool that inefficiently saves web pages that we might visit again while simultaneously reducing our productivity, increasing our anxiety, and crashing our machines
Skeema: The anti-tab revolution
The researchers concluded that at least part of the problem is caused by tabs not being an ideal way of organizing the work we now do online.
- They propose a new model that better compartmentalizes tabs by task and subtask, reflects users’ mental models, and helps manage the users’ attention on what is important right now rather than what might be important later.
