Tabs are everywhere. The most common complaint is that they allow lazy UI design. It’s easy to see why that argument has come about, but tabs are undeniably useful, to break things up, or as a grouping control. For my money, here’s the 101.
Excel’s option dialog is awash with tabs, 13 all told. I’ve been using Excel for years, I still can’t remember where all the options are, I know there in there somewhere, but often times I’ll have to do a bit of hunting. Not clever!
MS Project is better, the tabs are all the same size which is an improvement, but still look at how many there are – 3 rows no less!
Firefox uses pictures, which I like, but its real win is that there’re only 7 tabs – on one line. Ok, so Firefox has fewer features than Excel or MSP. Still that’s not the point, the point is the number is manageable – having everything on one line is “Log2(N-1)”* times easier to consume than multiple line.
Best of all I like tabs down the side. I don’t think they work in all cases, but for something like options, down the side is good. Office 2007+ has swapped to this design in a lot of its dialogs. I don’t love its implementation, but the ideas good. Visual studio does it well. There are tabs across the top, so another “sub set” would be confusing, down the side makes sense. UI design should be about making sense! Also it’s really well done. Look how the selected tab stands out, and is associated to the content on the RHS.
So over all I would suggest,
1. Keep the number of tabs down, no more than 6
2. Only one row
3. Use images if you like
4. Use RHS tabs where you can – Sadly VBA’s tabs down the RHS are quite poor.
These are just my unqualified thoughts of course, you’re welcome to yours, and feel free to express them in the comments!
*1. I’m guessing, that is to say it’s my option that it’s easier, and 2; I’m postulating that the difficulty of finding the right tab follows something like Hick’s Law.
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How does the number of tabs help at all? The options in Excel’s 13 tabs would still be just as many if it were just 3 tabs. At least you have one primary place to look, so not much exploring is required. So you prefer Excel 2007 because it has fewer tabs?
Hi Bob,
Fair question. I don’t actually like 07’s set up, it clumsy in my view, it’s kinda a list box type thing. But I do like RHS navigation better – It’s a smaller step from say a book, of ring binder affair.
There are 2 issue for me with more than 1 row of tabs. 1st, the tab moves from under the mouse, and the tabs are rearrange. That sucks. 2nd, is there’s too many options in the one place. In Excel for example the colour options could be accessed from the formate dialog,and the edit shape dialog(which you can do today!), – anywhere you can change the colours! The chart tab in the chart menu, and so on. I do think its nice to have all this stuff in one place, but I don’t think it would be worst if you put them right next to the feauers that used the settings.
There will always be a place for options, but with a bit of thought, some of these could be put in other places, reducing the number of tabs needed, and making it more intuative to use.
But like I say just my thoughts on the subject!!!
Bob -
2007 has MORE tabs. Just try formatting the lines and markers in a line chart:
2003: Patterns tab is all you need
2007: SIX tabs: Marker Options, Marker Fill, Line Color, Line Style, Marker Line Color, Marker Line Style
Tabs down the side. Welcome to MS OneNote 2007. Still not sure what it does.
I don’t use it myself Kevin, but I think it’s a good product, if you where a researcher or something I think you’d love it, it like an advanced scrap book. I saw a demo of it once and the guy searched for Book shop, and it even found a photo of a bookshop, because it had scanned the photo for text (i.e. the signage of the shop in the photo) and matched it – now that’s amazing, no?
I take all the points about bad design and so on, but the number of tabs is not a big issue (for me at least), it is the scattering about that gets me (aka 2007, probably has some of the worst visualisatiuons/GUI I can think of – or is that just because o familiairty, are there really worse out there – shudder!).
Kevin, know what you mean. I know people who swear by it, but I just don’t get it.
I was just using XL’s 13 tabs as an example, because I know there are a lot in Excel, my main thrust lay else where.
However, I do think that Excel’s options could have been designed better. It would be hard to re do them. But there are a few issues that annoy me, application level, workbook level and sheet level options are split clearly enough for my liking. I’ve not suggesting 07 is good UI, I agree with Jon, formatting charts is a PITA now.
>>or is that just because o familiairty,
I would say so to some extent. But this thing with familiarity is this, if the new thing is better, you embrac it and move on, if the new thing is not better (or not better enough!) then you don’t, that I think is the key thing.
I bet there are worst GUI’s out there than Office 2007, and just wait until WPF starts hitting the streets in a meaningful way!!!
Good discussion, thanks
I think we need to distinguish between tabs in an options dialog and tabs in an operational dialog such as chart elements.
I actually like the Excel 2007 advanced options dialog sheet (not sure of my terminology), but to me better still would be a view mechanism which could change display between default outline hierarchy (what’s displayed already), alphabetical listing without hierarchy (but keeping groups within outline levels or within tabs), and even user-specified hierarchies. The last so I could group workSHEET, workBOOK and application level options separately and put my own most frequently needed options first (in my case, to turn OFF gridlines and to switch calculation mode).
But wouldn’t the MSFT WAY be to provide thumbnails of each tab’s contents on mouse-over?
Hi Harlan,
Yep, App level, Wkb Level and Sht level would be good, above all else for clarity to none expert users.
I use gridlines option all the time too, so I added it to my toolbar, I guess its hard for MS to get it right all the time, at least we can customise the UI if we really need to.
I’ve been looking all over for this!
Thanks.