Mozilla Labs Design Challenge Summer 09
My overall goal was to produce a design that could be used without changing existent concepts too much. For me the right to left tab-bar is like a memorable timeline that can be uses to navigate in “tab-space” so this concept keeps existing within my idea. The ways to keep this timeline organized should have minimal impact on the users habits and be visually-wise not very prominent. Managing a big amount of tabs is all about providing useful views so that the whole can be examined easily and navigation stays fast. Only if the user needs help to navigate a GUI-element should provided (on demand), bigger static displays like sidebars are avoided, because for me “space does matter”. If a user wants to go to a certain tab or webpage he/she has in mind, the access to it should be loosened from the space-concept of the horizontal tab-bar, so some kind of quicklink should be provided. Tabs for me are also all about positions in time and space one keeps in mind for a certain time like for a browsing session, so the user should also be provided with a way to get a visualization of a time based tab-context. So one can see which contexts (tabs) lead to the current tab and are thus related.
I’m quite a lazy user so I won’t expect others to organize the tabs all by themselves while surfing, this should be done by the browser, but always in a memorable way working with a space or time based metaphor so the access can be learned fast.
The DomainRestrainer utilizes a space-based icon list, the user should be able to memorize the positions in space quite fast because these will always be fixed. By restraining to a domain, tasks like searching or shopping could easily be bundled. Restraining thus provides a more specific “view” on the whole tab-space, I could also think of a DomainTab which bundles different tabs related to a overall theme/activity like shopping for example.
Furthermore one should be able to organize the domain tabs, but this is a task for the TabManager.
This is my way to loosen the access to domain specific opened tabs, so finding a flickr tab one has in mind could be much easier.
To keep track of movements in the “global” Tab-bar I can as well imagine a navigation “back/forth” for tabs.
This could be a way to give a time-based or parent-child-context view on the opened tabs. So you’d know that you came from a –> b –> c to the current tab d. I don’t want to mirror the browsing history here, so the “show in context” will only work for opened tabs, already closed tabs could be grayed out, but they could still be clickable if you wanted to revisit them.
