Your browser is a mess and it’s not your fault
Last year my browser was a mess: I had over a hundred tabs open across multiple windows, juggling between trips I was planning, products I was researching, papers I was writing, and articles I wanted to someday, eventually, read. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone: we and other researchers have found that between 50–60% of people find tab overload a problem. My tab troubles were not due to lack of trying — I had spent years trying out every tab management, note-taking, to-do, and productivity tool I could get my hands on, and while several worked for a while (kudos to tabs outliner which — while not the prettiest — lasted the longest) they would all eventually get cluttered and disorganized and I’d declare tab bankruptcy and move on to the next.
One year later, I was down to two tabs open and, more importantly, actually felt in control of the constant stream of projects and opportunities that live in my browser every day. How did we get here? This is a brief story of the science and design behind Skeema, a new way to interact with your browser aimed at decluttering your browser and your mind.
The design of today’s tabbed browsers dates back more than 20 years ago to an era of information scarcity, when the internet was about a billion times smaller and the hard part was finding and displaying web pages quickly. But fast forward to today and information is no longer scarce, it’s abundant: there is a billion times more of it, it is harder to sort through to find the good stuff, and now includes all our files and docs and lives. Because of this we are constantly switching between all the big and little projects in our lives and accumulating more opportunities than we ever have time to deal with. And the structure of those projects is constantly changing as we learn more, such as discovering a new neighborhood to visit on your trip or that there are actually four different classes of strollers you need to decide between and that you need to think about one-handed folding and whether you can carry it down the subway stairs.
This led us to ask the question: What if we had a browser designed to handle our infinite stream of ever-evolving projects instead of a flat list of independent web pages?
To answer this we first needed to understand how existing browsers and apps weren’t working. Perhaps because we take tabs so much for granted, we couldn’t find any major studies on tab usage in the past decade so we did our own. We interviewed knowledge workers and surveyed over a hundred people asking about each tab they had open, why it was still open, and why current solutions didn’t work for closing them. While our results are better written about in various press outlets (such as FastCompany, Inc, Mashable, El Pais, and more), the TL/DR is that the top reasons for keeping tabs open were:
- Reminding & Resumption. You’re constantly switching between unfinished tasks all day, leaving tabs open so you don’t lose where you left off
- Refinding. You leave docs and links open to avoid digging through emails or Slack or drives to find them again
- Resurfacing. You leave articles and papers open to read later because putting them away feels like giving up on your future self and opportunities for a better life
- Research. You are doing complex research tasks like trip planning or programming where you are learning about different options and criteria to evaluate
We also learned that there was no solution that addressed all of the reasons above while staying manageable and organized over time. Approaches that supported reminding, like vertical tabs or tab groups, got cluttered as the number of tasks grew. Approaches using separate windows or sessions eventually suffered from browser drift — as people multitask it is too hard to keep every space perfectly separated and organized. And approaches that put tabs out of sight, like bookmarks or reading lists or automatically closing old ones, end up being a black hole of lost opportunities.
We realized that the core interface between the human and the data — the tab — needed to be rethought. In current browsers tabs are like rigid stone tablets; you can’t really do anything with them except read them. But what if tabs and the information in them and in your head were instead treated as building blocks of larger projects? What if we could bring the affordances of to-dos, outlining, note-taking, and scrap-booking to tabs so that you could create projects that reflect the mental models you naturally build up in your head?
To test this idea we developed our first prototype of Skeema rethinking the rigid tab as a flexible building block. For example, if you’re planning a trip and comparing AirBnBs you could grab clips that capture what makes them special, add notes about pros and cons, prioritize the ones you like the best to keep them at the top, and nest that decision along with all the other decisions you need to make like choosing flights, what to see, and where to eat. From there with a click you can share it with anyone on the web.
In addition to researching things, our users also would use Skeema as a launchpad for all the different projects they were switching between over the course of a day, such as for different clients, classes, or meetings. They would collect all the links to documents, zooms, files, and project trackers they needed that they’d otherwise have to dig through their emails and slacks and messages for, and give them understandable names and notes and next steps. Whenever they’d open a new tab Skeema would be right there as a control center for them to switch context to the next project without leaving all their tabs open.
Over the past year Skeema has been in closed beta while we fleshed out that prototype into a new way of using your browser that is deceptively simple to start using but powerful and flexible enough to handle the deluge of information you encounter beyond a few days, weeks, or months. Our top 25 users average 10 months of use, 28 uses a day, and over 800 items saved (one has over 6000). Our closed beta had about 500 users (most of whom had found it in various press outlets) with a 30-day retention rate of 79%, more than 10x the market average, with people calling it “an efficiency dream”, “a central console for navigating the web”, and “an expansion card for your unstructured mind.”
The future of the browser and human intelligence
The vision behind Skeema is of the browser as a seamless extension of our minds. Right now it solves the first critical step of this vision: managing our attention and staying in control of an infinite stream of ever-evolving projects. Meanwhile, our past research lays out the near future for Skeema in helping you collect, organize, and synthesize all the information you need to make the best decision or stay on top of your field.
For example, imagine if each of your projects was an AI-powered workspace that could help you organize your information into topics, threads, or tables, or even “read your mind” as you browse to build them automatically for you. And if you could encode your preferences into them once (e.g., for ramen restaurants that simmer their broth for three days) so they could be your agent to find and filter information for all your future projects (e.g., for every trip you go on).
And imagine if you could collect information into those projects effortlessly as you read on your mobile phone by just wiggling the screen when you see something you want to capture. Or put decisions literally at your fingertips with intuitive touch-based visualizations that can speed up comparison by 10x or more.
Finally, imagine if all this work we’re doing while making sense of the web — about a trillion hours a year, or 10% of all labor hours — wasn’t just thrown away after we’re done, but is captured and aggregated so that others can build on it, creating a virtuous cycle of knowledge acceleration.
Hopefully you won’t have to imagine much longer — we’re hard at work adapting all of the research linked above and more into Skeema. Try it out and join us in our journey of reinventing the browser to help people be more focused, productive, and intelligent.
(You can try out Skeema here. If you have any feedback or want to get involved email us at support@skeema.com)
I can’t end this article without a shout out to the hard work of dozens of amazing undergrad, masters, and PhD students and post-docs learning and practicing rapid user-centered design and lean research to build a new product in a university setting — something I wasn’t sure was possible before we started. I’d like to also acknowledge with gratitude the support of the Office of the President, the School of Computer Science, and the HCI Institute at Carnegie Mellon.