From Tabs to Structures: Understanding and Supporting Web Page Management

Knowledge workers spend significant time finding, understanding, and relating information from different web pages. This process often leads to cluttered workspaces requiring active management of web pages, their evolving relevance, and relationships. Existing approaches, such as bookmarking systems, are often too rigid and impose considerable cognitive effort to create and maintain. In this work, we identify key design concepts to capture and retrieve the emerging and dynamic structures of web pages. In a field experiment with 29 knowledge workers (primarily students and IT professionals), we investigated current web management practices over time before we deployed our technology probe (Gstell) to explore initial behavioral adaptation to our design concepts in practice. Our analysis showed that many participants frequently struggle with excessive but inactive browser tabs and that the design concepts can alleviate the overload and improve focus. We discuss design considerations for more sustainable web page management.