Re: [Usability] Tabs

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

Tab are one of those things where I feel if you have to ask you
probably know deep down it is something you shouldn't be doing.

To be absolutely clear on my bias: Tabs should only be used sparingly.

> FWIW, there's some discussion on this at:
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72101

That bug report covers a lot of valuable points, in particular

> tabs should be implemented by the wm.

This is an idea which keeps coming up because "window management"  is one
biggest perceived benefits of tabbed interface.  The thing developers and
designers hate most about MDI including Tabbed MDI is how it often results
in reinventing the Window Manager inside one application at a time.  This
points to a bigger issue, and I believe any look at tabs should also look
at improving batch processing of multiple documents as well as ways to
improve the window/task list.  It is important to try and understand the
problems users think a Tabbed interface will solve and treat the problem
not the symptoms.

The other claimed benefit of Tabs was speed because Mozilla was and still
is horrendously slow at opening a new window compared to opening a new
tab.  Any developer considering implementing a tabbed interface should
also look at trying to improve the time it takes to open new windows.


> > The Firefox people think that a X for each tab is much too
> > complicated. I don't think so. What do you think? Anybody has done
> > usability studies on that?

Spreadsheets have been using Tabbed Document interfaces for longer than
most and although they are used to represent seperate sheets within a
larger document, putting Close buttons on every tab will cause more
inconsistency problems than it could solve because it will never be
approrpiate for spreadsheets and any other applications which use Tabbed
Document interfaces in that way.

The browser is one of the most used applications and there will always be
a penalty to doing things differently from such a well known behaviour
(inconsistency and yet another thing to learn).

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2004-March/msg00118.html
This post on the Gedit mailing list points out the benefit of a context
menu on each tab, which invariably includes the option to close the tab.
This approach gives users a fairly convenient way to close one specific
tab and there is less chance of accidentally closing a tab you intended to
select.

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2004-September/msg00058.html
There was a discussion a while back about adding a Read Only indicator to
Gedit and in that discussion the issue of tab spacing and how cramped it
was came up, which only convinced me futher it was a bad idea to have a
close button on every tab.

I have plenty more to say about Tabs but I've said enough for now.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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