2021/05/06 by Joseph Chee Chang, Nathan Hahn, Yongsung Kim +5 · 1 citation
Decision Sciences · Computer Science · Engineering · #Personal Information Management and User Behavior #Usability and User Interface Design #Web Data Mining and Analysis #Sensemaking #Computer science #Closing (real estate) #World Wide Web #The Internet #Set (abstract data type) #Work (physics) #Face (sociological concept) #Data science #Human–computer interaction #Engineering #Business
paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3411764.3445585
openalex publication_date 2021/05/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Tabs have become integral to browsing the Web yet have changed little since their introduction nearly 20 years ago. In contrast, the internet has gone through dramatic changes, with users increasingly moving from navigating to websites to exploring information across many sources to support online sensemaking. This paper investigates how tabs today are overloaded with a diverse set of functionalities and issues users face when managing them. We interviewed ten information workers asking about their tab management strategies and walk through each open tab on their work computers four times over two weeks. We uncovered competing pressures pushing for keeping tabs open (ranging from interaction to emotional costs) versus pushing for closing them (such as limited attention and resources). We then surveyed 103 participants to estimate the frequencies of these pressures at scale. Finally, we developed design implications for future browser interfaces that can better support managing these pressures.