The authors use cross-cultural examples of proverbs to illustrate their model, suggesting that the human cognitive experience of creating, learning, and using poetic metaphor is universal.

Highly recommended to anyone looking for a theoretical model for analyzing how well a metaphor is likely to function when unleashed on the world as a teaching tools, or even a bit of software/hardware interaction.

I would rather make a UI that is obvious and intuitive, even if there is no metaphor to describe it. I believe this is best done by providing a UI that draws on our precognitive perceptions. That is, it should grab our brains at a level below where metaphor operates. A good example of this is the use of meaningful images. Several early suggestions involve providing arrays of scaled images of web pages. While I think all of them have a long way to go, they have the essential element of being visceral, going right to the bottom of what it means to be human.

I just read Oliver Reichenstein’s proposal (http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/)
It does seem to be just a nicer view of bookmarks and history. Maybe if they’re presented better I’d use them more but the two problems I see are: Bookmarks need effort/thought to organise and sites must be important enough to save for later, while History is a mix of sites I’m interested in and others that I was just passing through, ie lots of noise.

The thing I find useful about tabs is their ‘ad hoc’ nature. I tend to create ad hoc groups of tabs by opening a new browser window for each group. Even my girlfriend has worked out how to do this too. I very rarely would want to save these groups permanently (or bookmark any of the sites). It would be handy to be able get back one of the groups I had open yesterday though.

The main thing I find annoying about the current mode in browsers is that it’s often hard to quickly find a particular tab once I have lots of them open. The windows task-bar only shows the title of the currently selected tab, and the browser’s horizontal tab-bar means that the page titles get truncated to just the first part (which will usually be common between pages on the same site).

Being a browser snob I’ve never actually tried IE8 but it sounds like they have taken a step in the right direction, with a method for automatically creating ad hoc tab groups:
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/09/30/ie8-tab-grouping.aspx

I really like the idea, but the implementation (single row of colour-coded tabs!) seems awful.

What I think would be good is if there was some kind of view in the browser I could use to get a clear map of the groups and tabs I have open, to easily find the page I want to switch to. This might be a full-page view or just a sidebar.

It’s interesting chofmann’s comment above about how ‘tabs’ became divorced from the notebook metaphor. So now every page is it’s own tab, which would be a strange notebook.

Maybe the ‘groups’ become the tabs and the individual pages become items in a sidebar list.

Groups need to be identified somehow. Ideally without me having to manually ‘name’ them. Maybe it could do something clever with the content of the pages in each group, eg pick out shared keywords.

> All metaphors should have a solid analog in the physical or
> tangible universe and Tabs is clearly in that category. When
> a metaphor fails, you should go back to its analog. Does it
> fail in that space? If it does maybe it means the metaphor
> itself is inappropriate.

You can from that link about the quatto pro 1.0 for windows release, the orginal metaphor was not “tabs”, it was “the note book” metaphor.

Maybe somewhere along the way we got lost and it became just tabs. A notebook allows the user to do a little work to not only arrange collections of information in 3d (depth), but but by opening the ring binder the pages can be organized under (tab) categories.

If you take Matts comment above:

> web browser has semantic information about what resides in
> each tab and how that location was reached.

or even the simple notion of a tab listing each domain and on hover you might get a drop down of other pages on that domain you might come up with something interesting.

A Tabbar looking like

[google][facebook][linked-in][nytimes]

and hover over the [google] tab gets any pages or apps that you might have opened within the google.com domain

[google]
[gmai]
[search]
[docs - budget page I'm working on]

-chofmann

To properly address the issue, the navigation and usage concepts of the web browser need to be approached not as a collection of distinct, unique locations, but instead as a an organization of document views. I have come up with a few concepts, none of which have been submitted. The issue with each of them (and in my opinion, many of the already submitted concepts) is ease of use and screen real estate. You cannot assume that every user has a widescreen monitor and that every webpage doesn’t fill up the entire window. From a usability perspective, if the “document display” the user is looking for cannot be seen, conceptually, it is gone, lost.

Users understand that when they want a “new” thing, it will take two clicks. To go to something they already have open, it should be a one click process. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), this means an entirely new, completely foreign, metaphor is needed to replace tabs that keeps the same space conservation but is expandable to a reasonable infinity.

Great Article, but just to set the record strait it was quattro pro 1.0 for windows that started the wave of tab use for spreadsheets and windows applications…

From the far away land of 1993 when the desktop was in the middle of a revolution

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1563/is_n2_v12/ai_13990661/

“… Quattro Pro provides a new twist on the old concept of working with numbers. Unlike Excel and 1-2-3 for Windows, which organize multiple spreadsheets into multiple display windows, Quattro Pro uses what Borland calls a Notebook metaphor. Individual spreadsheets in a Quattro Pro file are represented by separate tabs, running across the bottom of a stylized Notebook display. Initially marked with single letters (A, B, C, and so forth), the tabs may be assigned representative names. Quattro Pro’s Notebook metaphor results in a display that’s much less cluttered than either the Lotus or Excel screen and multiple spreadsheets that are much easier to access on the fly.”

Right click context menus and ‘object inspection’ were also a big innovations in that quattro pro release. It was an amazing time. Check out the price for those innovations

LIST PRICE: $495
AVERAGE STREET PRICE: $305

Shortly after that Microsoft did tabs, drove the price of spreadsheet apps to $15 a box, integrated it into the office suite and killed off Borland.

Its good to see we are on the path to reexamine tabs a meer 16 years later. Your three points of advice on what to look at next are a good direction. If you ask a new or novice user to describe describe the web you get amazing and sometimes bizzare answers. I would venture to say average person has trouble understanding the connection and relationship between their browser application, internet service provider, search provider, and websites and web applications. Its all bound up in a hairball to them and what comes out is stuff like “the blue ‘e’ is my internet”, and “if I use firefox will I still be able to able to get to my mail (e.g. webmail)”

It seem like stuff like that is going to make it hard to get a visualization of “a data delivery system and is a window of a cloud-based computing architecture”

Is there some general user education needed or can we design something with a metaphor that catches the imagination and helps to explain away the complexity of the web.

-chofmann