SI Students rethink the browser at design jam

Source: Flickr

This past Wednesday, SI students met to discuss the web browser of the future and what features it should include, as part of the Browser Design Jam co-hosted by SOCHI and SCSI and sponsored by Mozilla and SourceForge. We started off with a general brainstorming session, then broke into special interest groups to flesh out four topics of interest and produce user stories for our next event. Here are the four groups that formed and what they came up with:

Tabs group
This group focused on how browser tabs might be improved. Taking a page from Mac OS X and its Expose feature, they suggested that tabs could reorganize themselves into separate windows when a button is clicked on or moused over. These windows would be clustered by similarity, and less recently viewed tabs would fade out. One related idea that was discussed was to allow these windows to flash or highlight if their content was updated.

Here are their user stories:

• I don't want my tabs to take up so much real estate in my browser.
• I want my tabs to be organized based on content.
• I want my most recently viewed tabs to be more prominently shown.

History Group
A second area of focus was how the browser could represent your history of pages. The ideas of this group included having the full text of pages you visited be searchable, as well as using screenshots to represent a page you have visited rather than just the page title. The group also proposed better sorting functionality, such as grouping pages by browser session.

Here are their user stories:

• As a frequent web user, I wish I could navigate through my history list as easily as I surf. Visual cues would be very helpful.
• I want to browse my history by browser session because my experience is different every time.

Automation Group
One group of students described how the browser could automate routine tasks for you. An example would be opening up an entire group of websites that the user visits frequently. They discussed how the browser might look at user's context, such as the time of day or other tasks the user is engaged in. Additionally, they wanted the browser to allow some tabs to be selected as "always open", which would help when there are currently too many open tabs to display them all.

Here are their user stories:

• The browser should anticipate my actions in response to my schedule and/or context.
• The browser should make it easy to access my most frequently used websites.
• The browser should help me do common tasks easily & quickly.
• The browser should let me see multiple websites in one window.

Web Apps Group
The final group was focused on how to improve the experience of applications that run through the browser. One of the primary issues they dealt with was how to make a web application feel more like a desktop application. They proposed that the browser window should be more minimalist to provide better use of real estate, and that it should resize more fluidly to incorporate elements like toolbars.

Here are their user stories:

• I want web apps to feel like desktop apps.
• I want web apps to work offline.
• I want to work on many different things at once.

In closing, SOCHI would like to thank all the students who took time out of their busy schedules, and SCSI for helping orchestrate the design jam. Pictures of the event can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sisochi/sets/72157607559602081/. We hope to see you at our second design jam, to be held in about three weeks!