Piles, Tabs and Overlaps in Navigation among Documents

摘要

Navigation among documents is a frequent, but ill supported activity. Overlapping or tabbed documents are widespread, but they offer limited visibility of their content. We explore variations on navigation support: arranging documents with tabs, as overlapping windows, and in piles. In an experiment we compared 11 participants' navigation with these variations and found strong task effects. Overall, overlapping windows were preferred and their structured layout worked well with some tasks. Surprisingly, tabbed documents were efficient in tasks requiring simply finding a document. Piled documents worked well for tasks that involved visual features of the documents, but the utility of recency or stable ordering of documents was task dependent. Based on the results, we discuss the effects of spatial arrangement, visibility, and task-dependency, and suggest areas for future research on document navigation and its support by piling.