HIG: tabwidgets

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday 09 March 2006 20:31, Gábor Lehel wrote:
> On 3/10/06, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> > On Thursday 09 March 2006 10:37, Gábor Lehel wrote:
> The one issue I can imagine is people accidentally clicking the close
> button when they didn't mean to -- I think the many pros outweigh this
> potential con, 

IIRC we actually had this turned on by default in konqi when tabs first 
appeared and it was such a horror-show of people accidentally closing tabs 
that it was disabled eventually

> but then I also suppose it's not an accident that the 
> undoing of closed tabs got added to Opera at the same time.

yep

> > > - Drag & drop reordering of tabs. If you drag to outside of the tab
> > > bar, though, it works just like normal drag & drop.
> >
> > seems we have consensus on this one.
> >
> > > - You can click on the active tab to 'minimize' it*, like with a
> > > taskbar -- this means it won't be the tab that gets activated after
> >
> > power user feature? i'm wary of "magic clicks" to be honest.
>
> How come? 

because unless it's a common interaction mechanism or plainly documented, 
people often don't get what just happened ("woah.. i clicked on the tab and 
it did .... something") and this in turn lowers their trust of the system 
which in turn impacts their willingness to try things and their comfort 
level. in other words, it erodes the user experience.

> It's a bit of a niche feature to be sure, but it's pretty 
> useful, and I don't see a drawback.

niche features can be added as off-by-default options perhaps. but certainly, 
unless they have no other impact in their being on, they shouldn't be part of 
the default HIG standard for tabs.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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