(For people who heavily rely on tab management)

Hello.. I'm conducting this user research for a conceptual built-in tab management feature I'm designing for the Google browser (Chrome).

• Do you find navigating tabs in Google frustrating at times?
• In what way does the current feature stagnate your productivity?
• What part of the Google tab management feature do you think would need some improvements?

🎯 Problem Statement

As a designer who's always in the learning phase, I regularly have stacks of tabs open on my browser. There was one point in time that my tab tray was so cramped and filled with websites, only the favicon of the tab and the "close" button were displayed. When switching tabs was a challenge due to the tabs proximity with each other, tabs weren’t legible and was harder to distinguish. Experiences like these increased cognitive load for other users (including me) navigating, potentially leading to slips such as accidental closure of tabs and reduced productivity in workflows.

Searching for a particular website became an unpleasant and frustrating task. When I thought tab grouping would solve the issue, it didn't. It made everything more complex!

And yes some people would say "just search it through the dropdown bar!" Well, That was also an issue.

The current tab management feature Google has is the "Search tab dropdown bar" which might be an adequate solution but there were inconsistencies.

Active tabs didn't follow a sequential order of time nor direction, instead they were arranged randomly in the list, making it harder for users (including me) to trace tabs. Why?