Combinable Tabs: An Interactive Method of Information Comparison Using a Combinable Tabbed Document Interface

The Tabbed Document Interface (“TDI”) of today’s web browsers is widely considered to be a usability improvement over the previously predominate Single Document Interface (“SDI”). TDI styled interfaces however, especially in mashups or other overlays of different information sets, suffer from a key usability limitation: they cannot show two or more tabbed documents simultaneously. Users are left with the task of quickly switching between tabs when trying to visually compare content. Our contribution is centered on intuitively enabling the comparison of tabbed content via what we coined a Combinable Tabbed Document Interface (“CTDI”). This interface extends TDI to allow tabs to be dragged and dropped onto one another to form a “master tab” whose data page renders a “side by side” view of its combined “sub tabs”. The combined view will revert to the previous form when closing the master tab. It’s a novel solution for those websites that needs to compare information, such as e-commerce sites, online dictionaries, etc. To test the effectiveness of CTDI, we developed an online dictionary called “Engkoo” which puts the concept to practice.