[Sigia-l] tabbed design user test

[Jon Hanna]

> > Otherwise why bother with
> > tabs anyway? Looked at "from scratch" they are a rather messy
> and wasteful
> > way of collecting links compared to a navigation "table" and
> uninformative
> > compared to links within text.
>
> Steve Krug thinks otherwise, and me too. I don't know how exactly it
> happened, but tabs are a de facto standard web interface widget now,
> users just "get it". Your argument makes some sense theoretically, but
> reality turns out to be different.

Aw well, as long as I'm the only person who finds them confusing.

Looking for some research on this I did come across
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991114.html from 1999, which to paraphrase
says that there are lots of people misusing tabs (as I maintain) and it may
hence end up becoming the de facto standard (as everyone else seems to
maintain).

So we can possibly date the demise of the semantically-useful tab at around
2000 :(