Your experiences concerning the need of using multiple browser tabs for Workfront

[lgaertner]

Hello,

as we are still evaluating Workfront we do not use it in production yet.

Today the question came up, if the average Worfront-User does use more than one browser tab for the application?

For this reason, I am very curious to hear how you work with the program in your daily workflows.

Thanks in advance.

Regards

Lars

[Madalyn_Destafney · Accepted solution]

Hi there, not sure if I understand your question but if you're asking if I have multiple WF tabs pulled up at the same time, it depends what I'm working on but I often do.
In WF there are ways to easily get to your most visited things that your users can also use:
- Favorited items
- Pinned items (top used pages that you can 'pin' directly to your own WF top nav)
- Global WF search bar is very intuitive and helpful

If you have a WF tab up on a page and then have another WF tab up on another, you can navigate within WF without moving where you were on the other open tabs. Hope this helps!

[Sheri_Whitten]

Same as Madelyn, how many Workfront browswer tabs I have open depends on what I'm doing (I counted 5 right now). But as an admin, that's pretty typical. I would say most of my users only have one browswer tab open, then utilze their pins within the same browswer window.

[Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore]

Hi @lgaertner,

As does @Sheri_Whitten, for repetitive actions (eg examining or modifying several items from a list), I too often hold [Ctrl] and click each item’s hyperlink to open each in its own separate browser tab, click each tab to view or modify as needed, then close each, ultimately working my way back to the tab with the original list, scrolled exactly to where I last left it (vs refreshing and winding up back at the top), ready to continue with the next items, if any, until complete.

That said…

A few weeks ago, having each independently suspected the same thing, a couple of my colleagues and I ran simultaneous performance tests on the above techniques and agreed that it is significantly slower (10-15 seconds) than it used to be (2-3 seconds). We observed each tab would “spin” until clicked (as if “focus” increased its loading priority); and by checking the developer tools, concluded that one of the WF monitoring processes was responsible for much of the delay (#YesDataDogIAmLookingAtYou), although the new “microservices” architecture could certainly have some overhead that needs to initialize for each new tab, too.

If anyone from Product (or even better, Dev) could explain this behavior, I am keen to understand the details.

Regards,

Doug

cc: note to self @Doug_Den_Hoed__AtAppStore  and @RandyRoberts 

P.S. if this answered your question, I invite you to consider marking it as the correct answer so others may more easily find it and benefit

[skyehansen]

it's not unusual to have more than one browser tab open. Our average user may often have a report on one browser tab and have used it to open several of the report rows in different tabs (e.g. a report of tasks they are assigned to, and then opening those tasks in other tabs to work on or close them out). Conversely the reverse can be true -- they can keep a report open permanently in one tab, and inline edit in it row by row, while going about the course of their day (a team of project owners can be working on multiple projects and update their status more easily using a list of projects set to a specific view).

Even from within the same project, a project team could opt to have at least 3 tabs open: one for the project task list, one for the same project's documents list, and one for the updates area -- just because it is easier to set up a split screen and arrange these elements in the user's preferred configuration. With this arrangement, the user can scroll through recent conversation, review uploaded files, and check and see how the project is going upstream of their assigned task.