[Sigia-l] tabbed design user test

[Whitney Quesenbery]

At 02:10 PM 12/10/2002 +0000, Jon Hanna wrote:
>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 :(

Actually, I think that there was much more misuse of tabs in Windows client 
apps than on web sites. They were originally designed as a paging device 
for properties sheets that had more than would fit on one screen, in a 
application development environment that rarely allowed for scrolling. But, 
once people saw them, the metaphor seemed very attractive as a way of 
chunking up a complex interface. This could be done with standard button 
bars, etc, but to be able to take a section of an app and encapsulate it in 
a single control? - almost irresistible. So, around the time of that 
alertbox, tabs were stuck in a kind of limbo between metaphors, as some 
people used them for their initial paging purpose, some to create sequence, 
some as a third or fourth level of navigation, etc.

When you are using a native (or custom) control, the use or non-use of tabs 
has a lot of technical implications. In most web sites, the tabs are not a 
technical construct, but a design metaphor - it would make no difference if 
the "tabs" were a row of square buttons or dancing monkeys. So, in this 
case, the search is for a visual metaphor that creates a strong sense of 
the navigational structure of the site - in a way that is helpful and 
useful (that is, usable).

I've seen a lot of attempts to write a simple "mission statement" for tabs 
- none entirely satisfactory. But the best common denominator seems to me 
to be the concept that the content of the tabs should be parallel in some 
way: these are the stores in our web site; these are pages of a long form; 
these are steps in a sequence, and so on.



Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC
w. www.WQusability.com
e. whitneyq at wqusability.com
p. 908-638-5467

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