Design vs Art Blog

A horrible example of tabs design can be found at Yahoo! Shopping. It’s weird to see these kind of things at Yahoo! but it’s true.

Here you can see two tabs highlighted at the same time. If you don’t want to confuse your users please don’t do this.

Clicking on “Holiday Gifts” the tab labels change, “More” disappear. Another usability problem I find is that they use so many words written in capitals everywhere on the site. Without doubt words written in capitals are harder to read. Plus, “SHOP FOR” is highlighted, it just looks horrible.

.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Tabs are use as navigation help for users, they are a resource to orientate them. Tabs are usually easy to integrate to every interface design but not everybody does it right.

PollDaddy, an online surveys and polls creation tool, uses tabs implemented correctly. The active tab seems to be closer to the user, the deactivated ones are shadowed in the back.

On the other hand, IDrive-E, an online backup system, is not using tabs at all. In the example, you can see how difficult is to see in which section of the website you are. OK, they write the title on the top of the page (e.g. Download) but the word is not even marked with a different color, this is a usability problem that might confuse users. Sorry, I don’t like it.

.

Disclaimer: with this kind of article I want to point out usability and interface problems some sites could have. Please do not take this as an attack, take it as a free advice. I would like to make clear that this design problems could happen for many reasons, including lack of time or money.

Popularity: 9% [?]