This week we were discussing web usability here at the office, specifically around Steven Krug’s excellent book “Don’t Make Me Think”. One of the high points was when our product manager pulled in a 3rd party and gave an impromptu usability test, asking this person questions and having them accomplish small tasks starting from Google. Nothing about this was specific to our particular workflow but was more to illustrate how these tests can reveal new information that is non-obvious to the ‘trained’ (familiar) eye.

Even from this 10 minute test example we learned a few things but one thing that stuck out to me was that fact that this ‘common web user’ completely ignored intra-site links. For each activity she just clicked back to her tab that had her Google search results loaded and continued opening new tabs from there, many times back to the same site she was just on!

This lead me immediately to think that Tabs have ‘Tivoized’ the web. Not in the LGPL Evil Hardware Manufacturer sense but more in the sense that tabs allow you to “pause” a browsing session while you explore off in a direction with no penalty for abandoning that path at anytime. Browsing is no longer a serialized process of forward/backward. Sure, you could always do this with multiple windows but Tabs just make it so much easier, so much more manageable and are mostly intuitive. Right click->Open In New Tab and your off to a whole new world of content. When your done you click back to your source tab and pick up where you left off.

Its even more addicting then Tivo in many ways because you can have an arbitrary number of nested levels, progressively distilling your search down to its purest levels. That would be akin to watching Tivo set to ESPN and progressively sub-setting ESPN’s content until you were watching a golf show set on Mount Everest being played by trained sea lions imported just for the occasion. (side-note: Only the Internet makes this analogy remotely possible or comprehensible, thanks Internet!)

This effectively allows a user to pick an ‘authority’ (usually google) and drive their entire browsing session from there. I suppose in this way of thinking any news or content aggregation site would be similar. For example, I usually start my browsing day at digg.com or reddit.com and rarely go beyond the pages that they directly link to, its always back to my digg tab for the next link since I don’t want to lose my place on digg (it refreshes to often and I lose my page ordering). However, I occasionally find sites that have interesting internal links and those tabs then end up staying open for one or more days while I jump off from that point and explore further. With these sites I do not refresh until I am done, I want to keep it in the state I found it so I don’t lose any interesting links, I “pause them” so that I can fully investigate their link potential.

Sites like the Huffington Post, that continually refresh their content via AJAX, annoy me for just this reason. I never have a paused state that I can fully explore.

Maybe its not the best analogy but tabs in a way let you pause the web and I thought that was interesting.