In the past week or so, there’s been a flurry of discussion about how Firefox handles tabs. One of the things that’s being discussed is the Ctrl-Tab feature in Firefox. Ctrl-Tab is a shortcut that moves you the tab immediately to the right of the one you’re on. Ctrl-Shift-Tab does the opposite, and switches to the tab on the left. In Firefox 3.1 branch, this has been changed to act more like Alt-Tab on Windows and Mac OS: it switches to the tab that you were previously looking at, rather than the tab to the right.

Atul Varma mentions some of the problems with this change. The visual representation used by Ctrl-Tab uses a different ordering than the tab bar you see on your screen, which is confusing. Aza Raskin suggested a different approach that might avoid the problem, but I wonder if we are thinking about this the wrong way.

I agree with Atul’s point that showing two different orderings is confusing, but I’m not sure I agree with this:

The last page that the user is on isn’t always their locus of attention. Indeed, unless someone is rapidly switching between two places, most people don’t even remember the last web page they were on; even less relevant is the second-to-last web page they were on, and the ordering of anything older than that looks like randomness.

I’m not sure this is true. There are many studies ((e.g. Improving Web Page Revisitation: Analysis, Design and Evaluation and Web Page Revisitation Revisited: Implications of a Long-term Click-stream Study of Browser Usage)) that show that the back button is the most frequently used navigation element in the browser, and the back button is a time-based list (well, mostly ((In fact, it’s not strictly time-based. If you visit pages A -> B -> C, then use the back button to return to page A, then follow a link to page D, then you won’t be able to return to B or C using the back button))). In general, I think it’s a really natural way of accessing recently-view items.

On the other hand, tabbed browsing has completely changed the way many of us use our browsers, and I don’t know of any study that accounts for this. Switching to a different tab could be considered to be a kind of navigation action, similar to following a link or clicking the back button. This is something I’m planning to address in my study. My hunch is that heavy tab users switch tabs much more frequently than they navigate to new pages, and maybe Atul is right that a recency-based mechanism isn’t the best choice.

But is the current ordering any better? By default, Firefox puts tabs in the order in which you opened them up. (You can move them around, but I find that I rarely bother.) I agree that it’s bad to have a mismatch between the ordering in the tab bar and the Ctrl-Tab order, but to me, it makes a lot more sense to use the order in which they were last accessed, rather than the order in which they were opened.

A completely different approach that I’ve been thinking about is to get rid of “tabs” altogether in favour of a better browser history. I find that most of the time that I open a new tab, it’s because I don’t want to leave the page that I am on. Sometimes it’s because I don’t want to lose something on that page (e.g. text that I have typed into a form), and sometimes it’s simply because I find it easier to use a tab than to use the back button. If the browser had better mechanisms for returning to recently-used pages, then I might not need to use tabs at all.

Right now my desk is littered with sketches about how this might work. Later this week, I’ll post some of my ideas. In the meantime, if you’re interested in this stuff, you should check out the whole discussion:

• Atul Varma: Tab Navigation: Tradeoffs
• Aza Raskin: Control-Tab Woes
• Jenny Boriss: Tabs Want to be Seen and Tab View vs. Application View
• and Danielle Fong has a monster post about tabs and multitasking, and suggests some ideas that are pretty similar to what I’ve been thinking: Enhancing Multitasking to Enhance Our Minds

The Scientific Angle

A few months ago, I experimented for a while with a dual-monitor setup. My main computer is a 14″ Thinkpad, and I connected to either a 24″ widescreen LCD (in my lab at U of T) or my 20″ widescreen at home. After a while, I found that I wasn’t really seeing the “obvious benefits” that some people rave about.

I had heard about studies that supposedly proved that you can be up to 50% more productive by adding a second display. In my post Multiple-Monitor Productivity: Fact or Fiction? I looked at these studies, and concluded that in some isolated tasks — like cutting and pasting, or working with a large spreadsheet — you can see a significant benefit if you add a second monitor. But for most programming tasks, the benefits are going to be minimal (but still there).

After another study was recently published by some researchers at the University of Utah, Jeff Atwood took the time to put together a summary of the studies of all the studies we could find — a “a one-stop-shop for research data supporting the idea that, yes, having more display space would in fact make you more productive”. In case you couldn’t tell, Jeff is a big fan of multi-monitor setups:

I have three monitors at home and at work. I’m what you might call a true believer. I’m always looking for ammunition for fellow developers to claim those second (and maybe even third) monitors that are rightfully theirs under the Programmer’s Bill of Rights.

The Subjective Claims

If you read the comments on Jeff’s article, you’ll see that, despite the lack of empirical evidence that programming tasks will significantly benefit from multiple monitors, many programmers are pretty attached to idea:

• Leon Mergen: “People who claim there is no benefit (or little benefit) in programming with multiple monitors, obviously haven’t really expercienced it.”

• SB: “Have you ever actually used (like, for many months/years) multiple LCDs? … I don’t know how a programmer could go from multi-LCD setup to single display & not claim some, even if minor, productivity dropoff.”

• Brian: “I personally find that in my case having a second monitor is ALWAYS more convenient and increases productivity.”

This morning I finally ran across a paper which talks about these subjective benefits. Jonathan Grudin’s Partitioning Digital Worlds: Focal and Peripheral Awareness in Multiple Monitor Use has some interesting insights. Grudin interviewed 18 people who used multiple-monitor setups, and came to the conclusion that:

A second monitor improves efficiency in ways that are difficult to measure yet can have substantial subjective benefit.

One of his interesting observations was that it’s not just about the screen real-estate, it’s also about the partitioning (emphasis mine):

A strong demonstration that multiple monitors can be more about partitioning than about increasing space is provided by the two participants who dock their constantly synchronizing palmtop computers next to their desktop monitors. One keeps his calendar visible on the palmtop, the other keeps email visible. The increase in space provided by the palmtop display is not significant and there is no information on the palmtop that is not available to the desktop computer. The value is in having instant access to a resource in a known location in peripheral vision.

This the same conclusion that Jeff made after seeing the results of a small, informal multiple monitor productivity study: two monitors is better than one large monitor.

Another interesting finding in Grudin’s paper was just how much people hate to use the taskbar or Alt-Tab to switch windows:

Given the ease of minimizing and restoring windows, why bother with a second monitor? Repeatedly, people indicated that they considered it a relief not to have to use buttons, “escaping from the need to Alt-Tab.” The ability to avoid a few keystrokes is welcomed with great subjective enthusiasm, although it might be difficult to objectively measure an efficiency gain.

Perception vs. Reality

To me, this really captures what the argument’s all about. It’s not necessarily about actually being more productive — perceived productivity is just as important. It reminds me of Bruce Tognazzini’s famous finding on the relative speed of the mouse vs. the keyboard:

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

In my experience, many people who love multiple monitors are the same people who are obsessed with knowing every keyboard shortcut in their text editor, and who can’t live without mouse gestures in Firefox.

Don’t get me wrong. Even if the benefits are unproven, minimal, or even non-existent (as in the mouse vs. keyboard case) — it doesn’t really matter. The most important thing is that you, as a programmer, have the tools that you want to do your job. I definitely don’t question the productivity benefits of being happy.

My friend (and recent DGP graduate) Gerry Chu has started a cool blog on interaction design called Design Transformations. It looks at how existing designs can be transformed into new ideas by applying certain “design transformations.” For example, his first post is about how a mouse is just a trackball turned upside down. Eventually, the goal is to come up with a kind of cookbook of transformations that designers can use for brainstorming.

The concept reminds me a bit of Roger von Oech’s Creative Whack Pack, which I got at a Christmas gift exchange a few years ago. It’s a set of 64 cards, each one with a different “creativity strategy.” Some examples: “Try a Random Idea”, “Imagine How Others Would Do It”, and “Slay a Sacred Cow.” It may sound a bit cheesy, but they’re actually pretty useful. See also Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.

(Photo by tanakawho)

In The Second Coming, written in 2000, Gelernter writes about a coming revolution in computing:

Computing will be transformed. It’s not just that our problems are big, they are big and obvious. It’s not just that the solutions are simple, they are simple and right under our noses. It’s not just that hardware is more advanced than software; the last big operating-systems breakthrough was the Macintosh, sixteen years ago, and today’s hottest item is Linux, which is a version of Unix, which was new in 1976. Users react to the hard truth that commerical software applications tend to be badly-designed, badly-made, incomprehensible and obsolete by blaming themselves.

He dedicates an entire section of the essay to the problems he sees with the current file-and-folder organizational model:

27. Modern computing is based on an analogy between computers and file cabinets that is fundamentally wrong and affects nearly every move we make. (We store “files” on disks, write “records,” organize files into “folders” — file-cabinet language.) Computers are fundamentally unlike file cabinets because they can take action.

[...]

30. If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.

31. Our standard policy on file names has far-reaching consequences: doesn’t merely force us to make up names where no name is called for; also imposes strong limits on our handling of an important class of documents — ones that arrive from the outside world. A newly-arrived email message (for example) can’t stand on its own as a separate document — can’t show up alongside other files in searches, sit by itself on the desktop, be opened or printed independently; it has no name, so it must be buried on arrival inside some existing file (the mail file) that does have a name.

I totally agree with the points he makes. These are things I’ve been complaining about for years, too.

Gelernter then goes on to describe (at a very high level) the organizational model that we should be using on computers:

36. File cabinets and human minds are information-storage systems. We could model computerized information-storage on the mind instead of the file cabinet if we wanted to.

37. Elements stored in a mind do not have names and are not organized into folders; are retrieved not by name or folder but by contents. (Hear a voice, think of a face: you’ve retrieved a memory that contains the voice as one component.) You can see everything in your memory from the standpoint of past, present and future. Using a file cabinet, you classify information when you put it in; minds classify information when it is taken out. (Yesterday afternoon at four you stood with Natasha on Fifth Avenue in the rain — as you might recall when you are thinking about “Fifth Avenue,” “rain,” “Natasha” or many other things. But you attached no such labels to the memory when you acquired it. The classification happened retrospectively.)

Our minds are extraordinarily complicated things. Should we really be building software that is modeled on that kind of complexity?

Modeling machines after nature is rarely the best approach. Our airplanes don’t have flapping wings, and cars and bicycles are not “running machines.” You can also think of spoken and written languages as “tools”, ones that have an intimate connection with our thought processes. If languages were modeled on the way the mind works, we would be speaking in sentence fragments, and constantly making up new words to easily refer to concepts and past events. Would anyone argue that languages could be made better by making them more flexible, more malleable, and a better match for our internal thought processes?

To me, modeling computers on our minds is just as much of a red herring as modeling them on file cabinets. Let’s build software for how our brains work, not like how our brains work. The best tools are the ones that support and compliment our natural abilities. My brain doesn’t have an internal calendar or to-do list, but those turn out to be remarkably simple and effective constructs that support my goals of accomplishing certain tasks. They are effective because of how simple and straightforward they are, and because they allow my brain to focus on what it does best (which is not remembering absolute times or lists of items).

(Brain photo by Gaetan Lee on Flickr)

This reminded me of an idea I had a long time ago — let’s call it cubist thumbnails. In Picasso’s Violin and Grapes, he represents a violin using its characteristic forms, but without painting the entire object itself. We see the curves and immediately recognize it as a violin even though it’s only fragments of a violin.

In the same way, my idea is to capture the essence of a web page in a small thumbnail. Instead of a snapshot of the page itself, a cubist thumbnail would be an abstract icon containing the characteristic colours and forms of a web page. For example:

Compare these to screenshots of the same pages:

I think it’s much easier to identify the sites using the first set of icons.

For text, it would be possible to do a similar thing by identifying the most common words phrases used on the text, with a focus on ones that are particular to that document, kind of like Amazon’s Statistically Improbable Phrases. Slashdot might be “nerds news matters microsoft linux cmdrtaco”.

In the first paper, Don’t Take My Folders Away!, the researchers surveyed a small group of people to see how they used folders to organize the files on their computer. When the users were asked why they created folders, the answer was generally “to get back my files”. But when they were asked if they would give up their folders and find their information exclusively using a search engine, the answer was a resounding “no”. The conclusion of the paper was that folders are not just a way to organize information — the folder structure itself actually contains information about a project. For example, a folder structure can indicate subprojects and subtasks of a project.

The second paper, “The Perfect Search Is Not Enough“, investigated how people performed searches both on the web and in their personal information. They found that people rarely searched for the specific item they were looking for; instead, they moved in small, local steps, using context to guide them. For example, rather than directly searching for a professor’s phone number (using a query like “david karger phone number”), they would search for the professor’s web page (maybe even by looking it up in a staff directory) and then try to find the information that way. The authors referred to this concept as “orienteering”:

Orienteering involves using both prior and contextual information to narrow in on the actual information need, often in a series of steps, without specifying the entire information need up front

Together, I think these papers demonstrate that while search is a useful way to find information, most people still need to use some kind of browsing to find the information they are looking for. The orienteering paper suggested that this kind of approach lessens the cognitive burden on the user. I think it really makes sense if you think of a real-life metaphor: you know how to find your way to a certain pub, but you don’t know the address and couldn’t give precise instructions about how to get there. Humans are naturally good at this kind of incremental way-finding, and browsing is a good way to take advantage of that.

(Photo by AlbeJTD on Flickr)

For these practical (and selfish) reasons, I’m really interested in the area of information management. In fact, it’s the area I’d like to focus on when I do my master’s in HCI this fall. As I learned more about the field of HCI, I found it a little surprising that very few people seemed to be working on this problem. I mean, it seems almost too obvious that people are finding it harder and harder to cope with the vast amounts of information in their lives. But lately, I’ve started seeing lots of interesting activity in this area.

The problem is fundamentally interdisciplinary, so it’s good to see that there is interesting research being done in many different fields, like computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and information studies. Within the “traditional” domains of computer science, there is work being done in the areas of databases and artificial intelligence. The SEMEX project, from the University of Washington’s Database Research Group, is looking at system for efficiently storing, managing, and retrieving personal information. Another interesting project out of UW, from the Information School, is Keeping Found Things Found.

Both cognitive science and artificial intelligence are concerned with knowledge representation, with cog sci focusing on how people store and retrieve information, and AI focusing on how to store information to create machines that think. This knowledge representation angle is the way that I’ve been coming at the problem. How can we structure the information in a way that reflects and supports the way people think? MIT’s Haystack Project is doing some cool stuff in this area: “investigating approaches designed to let people manage their information in ways that make the most sense to them.”

Along the same lines, I saw a really cool book that is coming out soon about information foraging theory. According to Jakob Neilsen:

Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.

It seems like most of the research that is being done into how people interact with information is focused on the web. That’s the main focus of the field of information architecture. Peter Morville is one of the gurus there; he literally wrote the book on information architecture. But I really think that a lot of the idea about web-based information can also be applied to personal information.

Anyhow, it looks like things are shaping up to get better — more and more people are researching the problems of personal information management. And more than likely, I will soon be one of those people.

(Photo by theCallowQueen on Flickr)

Afterwards, I started thinking about that sweet spot between humility and confidence. It happens when you are confident enough that you slightly overestimate your abilities, driving you to do succeed at things that you couldn’t before; but humble enough that you avoid those really stupid mistakes. I think the confidence comes from the emotion part of your brain — basically, your ego; and the humility comes from the logical part. So to find the sweet spot, you need to shut the logical part up just enough.