Jakob Nielsen: Using Tabs Correctly
According to Jakob Nielsen, dialog controls including tabs are most of the time used wrongly.
The biggest penalty goes to Amazon.com. Because he says tabs should be used to alternate between views within the same context, and not to navigate to different areas — a common mistake introduced by Amazon.com.
He cites Yahoo Finance in the article as the example that uses the tabs correctly (most of the time).
Another mistake that he mentions is, having more than one row of tabs.
Multiple rows create jumping UI elements, which destroy spatial memory and thus make it impossible for users to remember which tabs they’ve already visited.
I see this problem on some softwares, especially in the “preferences” window. Usually there will be 2 to 3 rows, containing so many tabs and when you click the tabs, not only the tab but the whole row will come to the front. This makes it very confusing to use the user interface.
He also talks about 13 Design Guidelines for using tabs correctly. The article is worth reading, especially for User Interface designers. Read the full article here.
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By PassivePassion on Sep 18, 2007
He’s right - the current Amazon.com tab system is atrocious, at least the UK site still retains most of the good features which used to make Amazon the hallmark of good tabbed design.