Reimagined Web Browsing: Stack's Balanced Approach Between Permanent Setup and Seamless Exploration
The internet has become an ever-present part of our daily lives, whether we're communicating, working, studying, shopping, or just having fun. Much of this activity takes place within a browser.
Meanwhile, browsers were primarily designed for exploration and have not changed much since. And exploring can be quite messy, therefore it needs proper user experience. On the other hand, the major tasks we now perform through browsers require a more organized approach.
Within Stack we try to achieve a perfect balance between Order & Chaos by giving our users tools to personalize their setup, while having a means to go on an adventure.
The Perfect Harmony of Order and Adventure
We categorize the web apps we interact with into two categories. First, we have Permanent apps - the ones we use every day and like to have at our fingertips all the time. Then, there are Temporary websites - the ones we open when we're browsing, conducting research, or just making a quick search.
🖥️ Permanent Setup
Originally, Stack was created as a productivity tool. It was intended to be the home for all of your daily websites and tasks, and still is. The design of it makes your websites feel like native apps. The shared sense is to organize a permanent setup for certain projects and tasks that users perform on a regular basis.
For this mission, Stack has couple of organizational layers to assist arranging websites in certain manner:
Card - is very similar to a browser window
Flow - is a collection of cards grouped by relevant context. e.g. for specific workflow, for a personal project, or for some activities like shopping, planning a vacation trip, etc..
Profile - for users who have multiple email accounts personal, work, student, etc.
Here is a rough sketch how these layers are organized in Stack
🌐 Browsing
As of this day, Stack's main value is in helping users stay organized. With that in mind, we wanted to introduce a feature that would allow you to browse without disrupting your neatly organized workspaces. That's how Card Tabs were born.
Card Tabs is still a relatively new feature, so we're working to improve it, but the basic idea is that if you need to quickly look something up or open some links you received, instead of opening a new card and trashing your setup, you can do a side-search without leaving a current window. When you're done, with just one click you can clear the mess those extra tabs created.
Another option for browsing is more suited when you are going on a bigger quest. Let’s say for example, when you received an email from your favorite brand announcing a Sale finally. In this scenario, as the search might take more time, and might get way messier, it’s recommended to open a new flow cmd or ctrl N and explore the options in more focused environment. When you're done, again, with just one click you can close the flow, and then delete forever.
The Internet OS
For users who are interested to find out more about how we see modern Internet and why are we moving forward to create a new software category, please enjoy a blog post from the creator of Stack, explaining the thinking behind the Internet OS.
