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.
