FirefoxMobile-SmartTabs

Smart Tabs for Mozilla Mobile

Project by Jan Dittrich

"How can the way we make the tabs better representing the pages?"

Goals: make tabs better representing the pages.

No-Goals: Change the general model of interaction with tabs, Use signficant more screen real estate.

Current Situation

Ideas for Improvement

Put the closing-Button on the right Tab side

• Pro: The more relevant left edge is free.
• Contra:
  • The left side is closer to the edge which means the area can be touched easier since one does not care about tapping a close object on the left side.
  • When dragging the Bar in, one sees just the Buttons at first.

Smarter Page Crop

Concept: ???

• Pro: Coosing a more representative part of the page means better recognition and more differenciation between similar pages.

• Contra: ---

Adding Favicon

• Pro: Visual grouping of same Domain-Pages. Recognize logos of commonly used webpages.

• Contra: Could be mistaken for a button if not carefully integrated.

Note:It is likely that the favicon itself is hard to recall for non-frequently used pages. But it often gives color clues for the page. (Further research is needed)

Better rendering quality

• Pro: A better rendering of the tabs will improve the recognition.

• Contra: Performance issues. Could possibly be solved by rendering low-Fi first and when e.g. the user reads the page, the hi-fi Tabs are renderend.

Retrive closed Tabs easier

Pro: Provide a Button oder Overlay-Button for retreiving an accidentally closed Tab. Contra: Takes valuable screen real estate.

Study 1: What do people recall about webpages

Conducted by Bastian Bügler and Jan Dittrich

Goal

...is to find out what people can recall about websites they visited previously (about 2-10 Minutes ago)

Methods

Participants had do do simple tasks on several webpages. After a masking time of a couple of minutes filled with other tasks, they had to tell about the features that they link with the webpages.