HIG: tabwidgets

[Gábor Lehel]

On 3/11/06, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> 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

I see the point, though I must note that having the close button
/instead/ of the webpage icon, on the left of the tab, doubtless also
had something to do with this. (I haven't heard any such complaints
from Opera users, thus far.)

> > 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.

I see where you're coming from: the importance of trust, confidence,
and comfort can't be understated*. On the other hand, as I've
mentioned a couple of times, the taskbar works the same way, so I
think that would qualify it as a "common interaction mechanism". Or
alternately: remove the functionality from the taskbar also. Is there
any good reason to keep their behaviour different?

* This is also why I'd be really, really happy if all the "are you
sure?" dialogs questioning the user could be eradicated in KDE4, to
the fullest extent reasonable. But that's getting off on a tangent.

>
> > 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.

They certainly should be: whether they are to be on or off, at least
by default. If it ends up being inconsistent that's even worse.


--
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.