If you’re interested in web browser user experience, take a look at Browser Bits, my little tumblelog/mini-blog thingy all about browser UX.

After reading the article, I was looking for a bit more information on CloudKick. When I Googled searched Google™ for ‘cloudkick’, here’s what I saw:

The CloudKick home page doesn’t appear until #5, and #4 is actually a separate page from their site! Not the best experience for someone searching for more information about the company. It seems odd that their official web site doesn’t appear until #4, almost as if it’s not really the official web site. And why does the contact page appear before the home page?

Notice anything else? The URL on the #4 result has www in front, but the one in #5 doesn’t. I’m by no means an SEO expert, but I know a thing or two — and I could tell that because links to their site weren’t using a canonical URL, Google was treating it as two different sites. This causes two problems: first, Google doesn’t know that the contact page is actually a subpage of the main web site, and second, it dilutes the PageRank, because Google thinks that these two results represent two different sites.

So I sent a quick tweet to CloudKick co-founder Alex Polvi to let him know about the problem and to suggest that they change cloudkick.com to be a 301 redirect to www.cloudkick.com (or vice versa). That lets Google know that both URLs refer to the same site.

And what do you know — they made the change, and just a few hours later, here are the results I get:

Looks a lot better, doesn’t it?

The moral of the story: you may not think you need to bother with search engine optimization, but paying attention to even the basics can give you a big usability win. Make it easier for Google to understand your site, and you make it easier for your potential users as well.

Since my talk, a few people have contacted me to ask about exactly how I did the logging, and did I notice this, or did people do that. Unfortunately, I can’t release my raw data, but I decided to do the next-best thing: release my logging tool. I humbly present tlogger for your consideration:

tlogger is a Firefox extension for capturing click-stream web browsing logs. In other words, it collects data about how the browser is used. Mainly it records navigation events and tab events, as well as the UI actions that cause those events. It’s roughly similar to the Spectator extension, but with a few key differences:

• it’s compatible with Firefox 2 and 3

• it doesn’t submit ANY data automatically, to anyone. Everything stays on in your profile directory, in a human-readable format.

• URLs are obfuscated on a per-user basis. From the log file, someone can see when the user revisits a site or a URL, but there is no way to determine what the actual URL is. It’s also not possible to make comparisons between users.

• it can log a few things that Spectator can’t, like when javascript on a web page changes window.location.href.

The source code is managed on GitHub at http://github.com/pdubroy/tlogger/. For the impatient, you can install the latest version of the extension or grab a snapshot of the repository. In addition to the source code for the Firefox extension, the git repository contains tools for analyzing the log files generated by tlogger.

tlogger is useful for anyone who needs real data about how people use Firefox. Of course, it’s perfect if you’re doing a field study on web browser usage, but it’s also useful for prototyping new UI features for Firefox. Liz Blankenship has already used it for her tabviz project, and discovered some interesting things about her own web browsing habits.

Enjoy! If you find it useful, or if you have any questions, send ‘em my way (email to pat, at the domain dubroy.com). If you make changes, send me a pull request on GitHub.

I 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 quite a bit of discussion, I thought I’d add a bit more detail here.

I was hoping to have a video to post, but that didn’t work out. So instead, I decided to try something different: I’ve written up the talk inline with the slides. It’s transcribed from memory, but I think it’s pretty close to the actual talk that I gave. Let me know what you think of this format — is it worthwhile?

You can also grab the full slides of the talk in PDF.

How do people use tabs?

For those who haven’t read my about page yet, I’m a master’s student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, focusing on Human-Computer Interaction. This talk was about the research I’m doing for my master’s thesis. If I can boil it down to five words, it’s “how do people use tabs?”

To give you an idea of how I got here: I have a love/hate relationship with tabs. On one hand, I find tabs to be amazingly useful, and I don’t think I could ever go back to using a browser that doesn’t support tabs. But on the other hand, I find I run into a lot of problems with tabs. For one, tabs make it much harder to use the back button. Instead of one trail of history, you now have several — one for each tab. If you’ve got 5 or 10 tabs open, and you’re trying to find a page that you were looking at just a few minutes ago, you might not remember what tab you were in when you were looking at it. That makes it really tough to find the page you’re looking for.

Another problem with tabs is that they subvert the traditional task management mechanisms of the OS. Exposé, for example, is a really useful feature on OS X. If you are looking for a particular tab, like GMail — if that tab is not the selected tab in the browser window, you’re not going to find it in Exposé. The same is true of the Window taskbar.

Tabs also force you to make a premature commitment. What I mean is that every time I click on a link, I have to decide whether I want to open it in a new tab or in the current tab. Sure, it’s an easy decision, but it’s still something I have to think about every time I click on a link. And that’s something we all do pretty often.

Finally, we probably all run into the problem sometimes that there are just too many tabs open. They clutter up the screen, the tab bar starts scrolling, and it takes an effort to clean things up. It’s a pain.

So, as I was looking for topics for master’s thesis, I started thinking — could I make something better? Could I come up with something that gives all the advantages of tabs, and eliminates some of these problems?

But as I was sketching up concepts, I started to realize that I really didn’t have a good idea of how or why people use tabs. I knew what I did, and I could ask my friends what they did. But I’m a programmer, and a lot of my friends are programmers, and we all know that programmers are not exactly what we’d call a representative sample.

So I looked at the literature. I had no trouble finding academic papers that looked at how people use web browsers, but surprisingly, I found hardly any mention of tabs. What I found was a big focus on revisitation. A couple papers on revisitation were published recently at CHI — one in 2008, and another in 2007 (and a good summary here). One of them didn’t mention tabs at all, and the other had only a brief mention of how tabs might change revisitation behaviour. I thought this was funny, because in my mind, tabs are highly related to revisition. If I have a page open in a tab, it’s because I want to go do something else, and then eventually come back to that page. To me, tabs offer another kind of revisitation, so surely they warrant more than just a cursory mention?

It seemed to me like a nice opportunity for my research to fill an significant gap in the literature. So I decided that I would do a study to investigate how people use tabs, and how tabs are related to revisitation.

In November and Decmeber of last year, I conducted a field study with 22 participants who each participated for two weeks. Unlike many studies done in HCI, these were not 22 CS graduate students — I really tried to get a variety of people to participate. In terms of age, most of my participants were in their 20s, but I had a few people in their 30s, one in his 40s, and another in his 50s. And in the study, only 6 of the 22 participants came from a CS or engineering background. The others were quite varied: I had some students from the social sciences, a high-school teacher, a professor, and some administrators from the university.

I wanted to gather both quantitative and qualitative data. So, I wanted to know things like:

• how many tabs to people have open, on average
• what percentage of links are opened in a new tab, vs. in the current tab?
• is use of the back button or other history mechanisms correlated to tab usage?

…et cetera. But I also wanted to know why people did things the way they do. And I wanted to learn what people use tabs for, what things they like and dislike, and what problems they run into.

Now, gathering quantitative data is fairly easy. Firefox is pretty easy to instrument, so I built a small logging extension that captured all the data I was interested in:

• Tab events: when a tab is opened, closed, moved, and switched to
• Navigation events: load start, changes to the URL, and load events
• Causes of the navigation events: clicking on a link, using the back button, etc.

(This extension is actually quite similar to the Spectator extension, but for a few reasons, I couldn’t actually use Spectator.)

So that gave me my quantitative data. What about the qualitative data? How would I collect that?

Well, that was actually a really tough question. I tried out a few different ideas, piloting them on some of my friends. In the end, what I settled on was this: periodically during the day, my extension would show a not-too-obtrusive notification asking the user to record a short diary entry about what they are doing right now. An interesting thing about this technique was that I didn’t actually get that much interesting information from these diary entries, but they were actually useful in another way. I interviewed each participant 2 – 4 times over the course of the study, and the diary entries served as a memory trigger, a kind of anchor to bring them back to a particular time or event. And then I could ask them about that event, things like: Why do you think you opened this page in a new tab? Were you still using this tab, or were you done with it? And through these interviews, I was able to collect a lot of really interesting data about how people use tabs, what purposes they serve for them, and why they do things in a particular way.

I completed the data collection before Christmas, and for the past few weeks have been starting to do analysis. I’d like to share some of my initial results with you. Keep in mind that these are very early results — they are far from conclusive, but it looks like there are some really interesting things in here.

One thing is that I’ve heard lots about what people are using tabs for. A lot of these things aren’t that suprising — they are probably things that you do as well — but it was nice to hear about them from other people, especially people who aren’t programmers.

Several people mentioned using tabs instead of the back button. For example, with a Google search, a lot of people will go and open several links in new tabs, and then go and peruse those tabs, and see which ones give the information that they need. Without tabs, they said that they’d click on a link, check it out, go back to the search results page, click on another link, et cetera.

They also mentioned using tabs as lightweight bookmarks. For example, you might look up a recipe for something you want to make for dinner, and instead of bookmarking it, just leave the tab open for a few hours until you are actually making dinner.

Similarly, many people said that they use tabs as reminders. One participant said that at the end of the day, she scans all of her open tabs, and can quickly figure out if there’s anything left to do before she leaves.

Of course, tabs allow people to multitask, to have several things on the go at once. Quite a few people reported keeping a tab open to Pandora or an internet radio station to listen to music while they are working.

And another somewhat obvious one is that tabs are useful for comparison. But what was interesting is that almost everybody said that tabs are better than multiple windows for this. It’s not clear exactly why, but people said that it’s just quicker and easier to switch between tabs than to switch between multiple windows.

Another question I wanted to answer was, what are the advantages of using tabs? This was kind of funny, but I kept hearing people say things like, “it’s just right there.” It seemed that the whole visual and spatial aspect of tabs was something that people really found helpful. People also mentioned that they liked having a visual browsing history. A couple people even told me that this helped prevent procrastination! If they were working on something, and then they went off an a little sojourn through Wikipedia, then the first couple of tabs would still be there in the top left, reminding them of what they’re supposed to be doing.

When compared to the back button, most people reported that using tabs is easier and faster. Some of them couldn’t quite put a finger on why; but others mentioned that with the back button, they don’t know how far back a page is going to be. But with tabs, they know exactly what they’re going to get when they click on the tab.

People also seemd to distrust the back button in a way. They said they weren’t always sure that they’d be able to find the page that they’re looking for, or whether the back button would even do what they intended (”Some sites don’t really agree with the back button,” said one person). Tabs, on the other hand, felt much more certain.

And of course, tabs allow new browsing strategies that weren’t possible before. For example, you can go through a bunch of links and open up several of them in tabs, and then go and investigate them. This can be handy if you’re in the middle of reading an article, but see an interesting link that you’d like to check out.

As for my quantitive results, what I have done so far is only very basic analysis, basically grepping the files and looking for the frequency of certain events. So take these early results with a heavy grain of salt.

One of the first things I looked at was the frequency of tab switching. As my benchmark, I used the number of link click events. Since I can’t (yet) accurately determine the number of actual navigation events, this seemed like the next best thing. And previous studies have shown that link clicks account pretty reliably for about 45% of all navigation events [Note: in the talk, I believe I said 50%].

What I found is that the median number of tab switches was roughly 1 for every 2 link clicks. This is interesting, because it would mean that tab switching is the second-most frequent thing that people do in their browser (link clicks are the most frequent, besides typing, pointing, and scolling).

But, I also found that in 5 of the 22 participants, tab switching was actually more frequent than clicking on links. And for all but two of my participants, tab switching was more frequent than clicking on the back button.

This is interesting, because up to now it’s been assumed that the primary thing that people do in their browser is click on links. And this may still be true (for some people), but tab switching is a close second. This means that the browser is used both for navigation, but also as a task-management tool.

Another thing I wanted to look into was how often people choose to open a link in a new tab. In doing so, I noticed something interesting: 6 of the people in my study never opened a link in a new tab, and 3 others did so less than 10 times. These people still used tabs quite a bit. Maybe they never felt the need to open a link in a new window, but I think it’s more likely that they didn’t know they could even do that. One person actually described to me a long work-around. If she was on a page with two links that she would have wanted to open in new tabs, she would copy the URL of the page, open up a new tab, and paste the URL in the new tab. Then, she would follow a different link in each one of the tabs. She did this so that she could compare between the two sites. The thing is, she was telling me that this was something she liked about tabs — that should could compare between two pages. So, even with the amount of work she was putting in, tabs were a win for her. Clearly she would benefit from knowing how to open up a link in a new tab.

The conclusion I make from these numbers is that opening a link in a new tab is not very discoverable. The only way you would find out about it is if someone told you about the magic Ctrl-Tab shortcut, or if you happened to right-click on a link. But that isn’t very easy to discover.

Finally, I noticed something interesting about the use of the back button. Previous studies on web page revisitation have shown that link clicks have pretty steadily accounted for about 45% of all navigation actions [in my presentation, I originally said 50% --ed.]. The back button seems to be accounting for less and less. In papers by Catledge & Pitkow (from 1994) and Tauscher & Greenberg (from 1995-96), the back button accounted for about 32 – 36% of navigation actions. Hartmut Obendorf and his co-authors, in their study published at CHI 2007 but conducted in 2004-05, they found that the back button only accounted 14% of all navigation actions. [A good summary of the different findings in all 3 studies can be found here]

[Note: I've corrected a few of the numbers here. In my presentation I believe I said that link click accounted for 50% of navigation actions, and that the earlier studies had shown the back button accounted for about 30%. I was slightly off.]

In my data, I’m seeing that the median number of back events is about 1 for every 50 link clicks, and for 9 people, it was less than 1 in 100. I don’t have an exact number of navigation events yet, but assuming that link clicks are relatively stable at about 45%, then back events would be less than 1%! In fact, 7 participants in my study used the back button less than once per day. And these people were among the heaviest users of tabs. Now these are just rough numbers, but even if it’s off by as much as a factor of 2 (which is unlikely), the conclusion here is that the back button is becoming irrelevant for a large class of users.

What’s still not clear is exactly why people are using the back button so much less. It might be that they don’t need it as much when they use tabs, or maybe that it’s harder to use when they use tabs. Or maybe it’s for other reasons entirely. [There were a couple of interesting suggestions about this from the Mozilla folks. It might be that a lot of sites are better designed these days and provide a way of going "back" without using the back button. Or, maybe that it's because many people are using web applications like GMail, in which it's not clear what happens sometimes when you press the back button.]

As I’ve said, these results are based on my intial, fairly basic analysis. I’m planning on digging a lot deeper. With the qualitative data, I’m continuing to analyze and code it, hoping to eventually come up with a kind of “theory of tabs.”

My quantitive analysis has been very basic so far. I’m currently working on tools to help me analyze the logs in much greater depth. (Yes, tools that are even more sophisticated than ‘grep -c’!) My plan is to measure a bunch of obvious things, such as the number of tabs that a person has open, the time that they spend on a tab, the portion of links that are opened in a new tab, etc.

I’m also planning on looking at tab switching as a kind of revisit — when you switch away from a tab and switch back to it, that’s revisiting the page, even though it doesn’t cause a navigation action — and comparing these results to papers on revistation that I mentioned earlier.

But I’m also looking for ideas. There are lots of interesting patterns that I might be able to find, but I won’t find them unless I know what to look for. Please leave a comment below and let me know your ideas.

These are just a few of the lessons that I’ve learned from conducting this study, and they might be helpful to anyone who’s thinking of doing a similar study.

First of all, I found that there are lots of people out there who are passionate Firefox users, who would love to be able to help out the project in any way. People would say to me, “I love Firefox! I’d love to participate in your study.” Even when I told them that I wasn’t affiliated with Mozilla, they were still really interested.

I also found that many people aren’t that concerned about someone seeing the web sites that they visit. Now, the people I talked to are a biased sample, because anyone who was really concerned about their privacy obviously wouldn’t be interested in the study and wouldn’t have gotten in touch with me at all. But out of all the people who contacted me, almost no one had any concerns about how the data was being collected. Now, I didn’t have access to any of their personal information — all URLs were obfuscated on a per-user basis, and no other personally-identifiable data was collected — but still, I was surprised how little concern most people showed. I was very conscientious about explaining exactly how I was protecting their privacy, but most people didn’t seem to care that much. A few even offered to send the full list of the sites that they visited, and even capture a video of them during web browsing. I had to pass on these offers though, as they were outside the scope of my study.

I’ve found that qualitative studies are quite hard — sometimes difficult to design, and definitely difficult to do data analysis on.

Finally, I found that the extensibility of Firefox is a double-edged sword. While it made it really easy to instrument the browser to record my data, the possibility of all kinds of other plugins being installed really complicates the log analysis.

And of course, please feel free to leave your comments below.

What I find cool about Ubuity is not that it’s “a command line for the web”, but that it provides a much simpler way to extend Firefox. To reach its full potential, I think it needs to move beyond the command line — which is why I was glad to see Aza Raskin (one of Ubiquity’s creators) blogging about making Ubiquity more mouse-oriented (see here and here).

The Concept

In Aza’s proposal, the main way Ubiquity would be accessed by the mouse is through a “badge” that appears beside the selected text, as in the photo below:

When the badge is clicked on, the page slides to the left to reveal the Ubiquity pane. Take a look at Aza’s video to see what I mean:

Mouse-Based Ubiquity from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Thoughts

The badge-with-selected-text behaviour can be incredibly annoying (e.g. Snap previews), but it can also be done well (e.g., nytimes.com). As implemented in Aza’s prototype, it’s very subtle, so I think it could work.

But there also needs to be a way to bring up Ubiquity without selecting some text. And whatever that is — a toolbar button, a context menu item, etc. — it’s going to be something completely different from this badge. It’s already a problem that Ubiquity doesn’t integrate into your regular workflow, and having two separate ways of accessing Ubiquity would only make things worse, in my opinion.

As for the slide-over effect, I’m not sure I understand the advantage over a translucent overlay like Ubiquity currently uses. And I think that if Ubiquity is invoked with the mouse, it should look as similar as possible to when it’s invoked with the keyboard, providing a smooth transition from mouse-based use to keyboard-based use.

Alternative Ideas

One possibility is for Ubiquity to have a dedicated toolbar button, like many extensions do. When the user clicks the button, the Ubiquity pane pops up or slides out. If we want to call attention to Ubiquity when text is selected, the button could change it’s icon in a subtle way, getting more colourful, or even glowing or pulsing.

There are other ways Ubiquity could be hooked into the Firefox UI. A Ubiquity bar could replace the search bar (since Ubiquity can do search anyways). Or maybe Ubiquity deserves its own pseudo-tab? See the sketches below:

Panel Layout

The real hard part about a mouse-based Ubiquity is figuring out how commands would be accessed using the mouse. Since Ubiquity is essentially a command-line interface, it can easily scale to handle dozens or hundreds of commands. It’s harder to imagine how that can be done with a mouse-based interface.

To complicate things, there’s no obvious way of grouping Ubiquity commands. Do you group them by verb? e.g. search, post, convert, translate? Or do you group them by site? Or…? And how do new commands fit into that picture? Overall, I think trying to fit commands into a static hierarchy is a losing proposition.

A Ubiquity user needs to be able to access all of their commands, but it doesn’t need to be especially quick to access any arbitrary command. Most people probably have 5 – 10 commands that they use most frequently (it would be nice to have some real numbers on this — Test Pilot anyone?). Those commands should be quick to access. For other commands, I think it’s okay if it’s not as quick.

I don’t have a complete design in mind, but I’ve sketched up a few ideas:

Any thoughts?

It’s definitely a handy feature. I often use tabs like lightweight bookmarks, leaving tabs open to a page that I am planning to come back to. (And in my field study I’ve learned that lots of other people do this too.) If your browser crashes, or the Firefox process sustains collateral damage in a kill(1)ing spree, it’s a relief not to lose all the tabs your were saving.

The Problem

But the interface for session restore has always bugged me a bit. First, it uses modal dialog boxes, which are generally a bad idea. One of great things about Firefox 3 is that it eliminated a lot of the modal dialog boxes (e.g. “Do you want to remember this password?”) in favour of non-modal messages in the notification bar (see Alex Faaborg’s post about this from last year).

Not only does it use modal dialog boxes, but it’s asking me a question that’s usually unrelated to what I’m trying to do. “Do you want Firefox to save your tabs for next time?” I’m probably closing my browser for a reason, but I have no idea whether or not I’ll need these tabs next time. And asking me when I start up might not be the right time either…I’m starting my browser because I have something to do, and I can’t remember what I had open before, so how should I know whether to restore or not?

Either you’re part of the problem, or…

So I’m thinking — what if we got rid of these questions altogether? What if Firefox always remembered what windows and tabs you had open? But you might not want 15 tabs loading every time you start Firefox up.

A while back, Aza proposed making the new tab screen more useful. His proposal included a separate screen for restoring recently-closed tabs and windows, but it’s kind of hidden in his design. Most of the space in his design is taken up by contextual actions, but when you’re just starting the browser, these aren’t as relevant. Here’s a quick mockup of what a similar screen might look like on startup (mouse over to see the notes):

There are a few things to mention here. First of all, recently-closed windows are accessed from within a history list. Lately, I’ve been thinking that so much of what we do in the browser is revisiting pages that we’ve been to before, so a time-based view makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately, the history is pretty much hidden in most browsers. So you can see some inspiration here from Google Chrome, which presents the history like a regular web page. I think this makes a lot of sense, because it lets you use the same behaviours that you use on the web, whereas a separate history window forces you to learn a new UI.

Recently-closed windows are presented in a way that looks somewhat like they actually appeared in the window, maintaining the tab ordering. It probably needs to be made a bit more obvious than in this mockup, but you get the picture. Of course you could go a step further here, and make it look almost exactly like a screenshot of the tab bar. This mockup only shows one recently-closed window, but you can imagine having more than one, and they would appear in the history at the time that they were closed. I’ve also incorporated recently-closed tabs into this page. That’s currently available as a menu item under History->Recently Close Tabs, but to me, it’s always seemed kind of tacked-on there. You could also imagine using some of the space here for bookmarks.

What do you think? If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment.

Looks like Windows 7 is going to have a bunch of interesting new task management features. (Of course, Microsoft has been pulling the ol’ bait-and-switch on things like since Memphis…we’ll see what actually ships.) The taskbar is getting a complete overhaul: thumbnails and “Jump Lists” look cool. Window management is changing as well; I especially like the ability to dock a window on one half of the screen.

Even if you’re not a Windows user, major new features like this will no doubt influence other platforms.

Engineering Windows 7: The Taskbar

Seeing the Ars article on Windows 7 reminded me about this post that I saw a while back. It sets the context for some of the new task management features. The most interesting part is seeing the statistics on what features of the taskbar are actually used, how many windows people typically have open, etc. This is a bit like the kind of data I’m hoping to collect with my tabbed browsing study.

Why Windows is less secure than Linux

This is brilliant. A graphical visualization of system calls in IIS/Windows vs. Apache/Linux. Full size images: IIS, Apache. (via Greg Wilson & Visual Complexity)

Cruz – A Social Browser for Mac OS X Leopard

Cruz is a new WebKit-based browser written by Todd Ditchendorf, the creator of Fluid. Some cool features: multi-pane browsing, a plugin API, Greasemonkey support, built-in TinyURL support. It’s only at 0.1 now, but I’ll be keeping my eye on this.

Fennec

Fennec is the name of the upcoming mobile Mozilla browser — think Firefox for your phone. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development for a while, especially the UI design discussions that Aza and Madhava have been having. Things are really coming along…last week Madhava posted a walkthrough of the first alpha version:

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

One of the coolest things about Fennec is that it dedicates the entire screen to web content. Pixels are precious on small screens, so you don’t want to waste them on controls that you aren’t using. On the iPhone version of Safari, the title and URL bar are fixed to the top of the page, so that as you scroll down, they disappear. But the navigation bar — with the back, forward, and bookmark buttons — remains fixed at the bottom of the screen. In Fennec, the title and URL bar also disappear when you scroll down the page, but the other controls aren’t at the bottom — they’re accessible by dragging the page to the left or right. Check out the video to see what I mean.

Edward Tufte would be proud: “the content is the interface, the information is the interface — not computer administrative debris.”

Computer Administrative Debris

In his critique of the iPhone interface, Tufte praises the iPhone interfface for minimizing “computer administrative debris”: the buttons, menus, labels, etc. that steal content space away from the users. This is becoming a serious problem as we continue to shoehorn our desktop interfaces into smaller and smaller screens. For example, take a look at an Asus EeePC running Excel:

Barely half of the available screen space is actually taken up by the content.

On larger screens, losing a little content space is not a problem. But then, I find it causes another problem: it’s distracting. My monitor is too big to run apps at full screen, so I have no choice but to work with clutter all around the window I’m focusing on.

Debris on the web

Inspired by Tufte’s coinage, Ryan Tomayko [redesigned his web site to remove all of the "computer administrative debris"](http://tomayko.com/writings/administrative-debris ) earlier this year. When I saw it back then, it caught my attention. I thought it was definitely an interesting experiment, but I thought it went a bit too far, although I couldn’t quite pinpoint what I didn’t like about it.

Earlier this afternoon, I was procrastinating on my thesis work, looking for inspiration for the long-promised redesign of this blog. I want to stick with something minimal, and I remembered Ryan’s site, so I swung by to check it out again. This time, I was able to put my finger on what I don’t like — it’s the missing title and navigation bar.

The thing is, without a title and navigation bar, the user is missing a lot of important context. When I visit a web site, I’m happy to see a small banner across the top with a few navigation links, because it quickly gives me some important context about the content I’m looking at, and about the site itself. It’s not strictly necessary, but that’s fine as long as it doesn’t get in my way, and lets my focus on the content. And the way most sites implement a navigation bar, it disappears as soon as you scroll the page, like the URL bar in Fennec. So it’s not persistently in your face, or wasting important screen space.

The other thing a navigation bar does is give you some idea about where the links lead. When I follow a link labeled “about” from someone’s blog, I have a pretty good idea where it’s going to take me. But if I just click on the person’s name, I’m not sure — maybe it’s a mailto link (note: I’m guilty of this one too).

So, by all means, let’s eliminate useless administrative debris. But be careful; you aren’t just moving functionality, you’re also removing important contextual information.

There’s already been lots of talk (and speculation) about the performance aspects of Chrome, and about Google’s strategic motives in releasing it. But of course, I’m more interested in the user experience. I’ve been running Chrome for over three hours now, and here are my first impressions of it from a user experience and usability angle. The Google Chrome web site lists the key features here; I’ll address those on a point-by-point basis.

One box for everything

There’s evidence that many people don’t know the difference between the search box and the URL bar (see here). Chrome avoids this problem by getting rid of the separate search bar altogether: URLs and keyword searches are typed into the same text box. They call this box the omnibox, and it works a lot like Firefox 3’s awesomebar.

This is a small feature, but a nice one. I’ve never understood why it was necessary to have a separate search bar and URL bar in Firefox, especially since you can type keywords into the URL bar and it will do a search for those terms. And now that I’m used to the awesomebar, I find myself typing search keywords into the URL bar all the time.

New Tab page

In Firefox and Safari, when you open a new tab, you’re greeted with a blank page. As Aza Raskin recently observed: “while clean, it has a 100% probability of not getting you where what you want to be.” In Chrome, when you open up a new tab, it’s filled with a bunch of handy navigation shortcuts. Again, a small but nice touch. It’s actually remarkably similar to some of the ideas that Aza has been throwing around for future versions of Firefox; check out his post here.

Application shortcuts

Another idea that’s been floating around in various forms for a while now: Chrome lets you create an “application shortcut” from any site that you visit. Basically, it’s a quick and easy way to create site-specific browsers for your favourite web applications. It puts a shortcut on your desktop to launch the site in a separate window, with none of the usual web browser controls. You can get similar functionality in Firefox by installing the Prism extension.

Personally, this is a feature I could take or leave. I’m not yet convinced that site-specific browsers are the way to go. I gave Prism a quick try with my GMail, and I found that I missed having the regular browser features at my fingertips.

Dynamic tabs

This is a feature I love: you can drag tabs out of their window to create a new window, and drag tabs between windows. I know Safari has supports this to some extent (don’t have my Mac handy to check) but I can guarantee it’s not as snappy as it is in Chrome.

Incognito mode

Unless you spend a lot of time…er, buying birthday gifts for your spouse, this is not a big deal. Basically the same as Safari’s “private browsing” feature.

Safe browsing and Instant bookmarks

Again, nothing too exciting here — Firefox 3 has very similar features, which probably greatly influenced Chrome.

Importing settings

Yawn. Next!

Simpler downloads

Another little bit of UI polish that I think Google got right. Last year, I wrote a post about how uploading and downloading are seams in the web experience. With Chome, Google has made a few small tweaks that make things better. Instead of a separate Downloads window (which constantly annoys me in other browsers), downloaded items appear in the tab they were downloaded from. Look in the bottom left corner of this screenshot:

What I really like here is that I can interact with the PDF icon just like I can on my desktop: I can double-click it to open it, or drag-and-drop it to copy it to a new location.

And another cool feature which they don’t advertise is that you can drag-and-drop files from Windows Explorer onto File Chooser controls — another feature I’ve been craving for a while.

Separate process for every tab == “runs today’s complex web applications much better”

This is Chrome’s raison d’être and key differentiating feature. In Chrome, every open tab runs in a separate process, with its own address space. From a usability perspective, this means several important things. First of all, the entire interface is incredibly snappy. In Firefox, there is a single thread that handles updating the UI and executing JavaScript on all open tabs. This means that one piggy site can slow down the entire browser. The Mozilla team did a great job on performance improvements in Firefox 3, but Firefox can still bog down with a lot of tabs open. In Chrome, the worst thing a bloated site can do is slow down its own tab.

Having a process per tab also means that a single buggy site can’t bring down your entire browser. Apparently plugins also run in a separate process, so no more worrying about crappy plugins crashing your browser (Acrobat, I’m looking at you).

In my opinion, the performance and stability gains are big usability wins.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m really impressed with the attention to the user experience in Google Chrome. Google doesn’t have a reputation for great UI design, with a few exceptions (GMail, Maps), but I think they’ve hit a winner with Chrome. There are no groundbreaking new features, but a bunch of small, solid improvements that make for an overall great user experience. The biggest thing most people will notice is that almost everything in Chrome is extremely snappy. This might not seem like a big deal, but it really makes the browser a pleasure to use.

Compare it to other kinds of group conversation we can have on the internet:

• IM, IRC, etc.
• Twitter and FriendFeed
• wikis (not all wikis are really conversation-friendly, but the original wiki certainly is)
• email, discussion forums, blog comments

Writing a blog entry in response to someone else’s is far more difficult than any of those. Partly, it’s because blogging is often slightly more structured and polished than the other methods; but there’s also a lot of overhead in the actual act of writing a post. For example, here’s what I did to write that post yesterday:

• track down links to all of the relevant posts. Not too difficult, because they link to each other; but for more than a handful of posts, this can be a pain. To make sure you’ve seen all the responses, you need to check Technorati or Google or something.
• for each post, get a permalink (you don’t want to just link to the blog’s front page, even though that’s often the easiest way to find the post)
• for each post, check if there is a special trackback link. Some blogs have these links, and some blogs don’t, often not due to a deliberate choice by the author. It’s really kinda complicated.
• write the actual post, maybe cutting and pasting quotes from the posts you are replying to. Link to the original posts, and make sure to cut and paste the permalink URLs.
• depending on your blogging software, select the category for the posts, and add some tags to the post. This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it helps your readers find your posts more easily
• paste any trackback URLs into the appropriate box in your blogging software

Compare that to how easy it is to reply to a forum post or email. Click one button, type your response, and you’re done.

And what about trying to follow one of these blog “conversations”? You have to keep visiting n different blogs to see if there are any new comments, and watching Technorati or Google to see if there are any new blogs linking into the conversation. Sure, you can automate some of this with RSS feeds, but that’s another complication that you need to manage.

If you’re a blog author, you probably get an email every time someone comments on your post. But when you reply, you can never be sure if the person will ever see your response.

Obviously, I think the good outweighs the bad, because I’ve kept on blogging. But I really wish it were simpler. I’d like to be able to join a blog conversation as easily as I can join an email conversation.

What do you guys think? Any blog authors out there who have found some good tools to make this easier? I know about CoComment for keeping track of the comments I leave, but haven’t tried it out. And I know that Disqus can also help, but that’s only good for blogs that are using the Disqus service.