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Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) hosts a National Science Foundation funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), which gives undergraduates the opportunity to research in their lab of acceptance. As a REU student, I collaborated closely with 2 researchers, Joseph Chee Chang and John Hwong, to explore the problem space around tabbed browsing in Professor Niki Kittur’s lab.
We wanted to gather deep qualitative insights on people’s challenges with tabbed browsing and their tab management strategies. Common browsing behaviors lead people to have too many tabs open at once. But when people have too many tabs open, they experience emotional and productivity costs.
In collaboration with the aforementioned researchers, I designed a discussion guide for semi-structured interviews. Over 2 weeks, we conducted 4 rounds of interviews. We wanted to see if there would be changes in our participants’ number of opened tabs or tab management strategies as they progressed through open-ended research work. Following the interviews, we looked for emerging patterns for the reasons or types of situations that caused an excessive number of tabs and started to generate codes in order to do thematic analysis.
This work was one of three studies that shaped a CHI 2021 paper on which I am listed as a co-author (see HERE). It received an 'Honorable Mention'. Reflecting upon the work, I would have narrowed the scope of interviews to get higher quality, though less, data. For example, I gathered data on some early design concepts that turned out to be of little use because of where we were in our design process. By narrowing the scope of our interviews, I could have further probed on participants’ answers or simply save everyone somoe time with shorter interviews.