Successful Blogs

Or - tabs, tabs and more tabs

Jakob Nielsen is king of usabilty, or so he would have people believe. Certainly, he’s been preaching it a long time, and arguably could be said to have invented the term in the first place.

I read all of his stuff as it comes out, and sometimes, I find his opinions, like his website, are too fixed following the mantra that he has created. Usability above all – who cares what it looks like (at least, that’s how it reads to me and a number of my webdesign friends). Webdesign and blogging has moved forward, and designers understand a great deal more about the usability of a web presence these days than when he started.

His latest alertbox, however, had me nodding in agreement with almost everything he said. Have a read of it, and then come back to me.

Read it? What did you think? Did it make sense?

The thing about his article was that so much concerned the almost minutiae of the webdesign. For instance, I didn’t understand the difference between sentence case (as recommended by Microsoft’s Vista user experience) and title-style capitalization as supported by Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines (who, let’s face it, did more to bring a GUI to the mass market than a whole army of Bill Gates’s). If these two ideas still leave you cold, go back and read the article. I caught you skimming, didn’t I?

I’ve always liked tabs for navigating between differing sections of a website. They’re a convenient way of presenting lots of content within the same visual experience, ensuring consistency across the website. And I know, some have looked pretty good, and easy to understand, and there have been others which have been just damned awful.

Nielsen makes some excellent points, especially point 10 (only one row of tabs – anyone used to wrestling with the innermost workings of Windows knows what this means) and point 11 (tabs at the top – have you seen those sites with tabs down the side, or even along the bottom? Stupid or what?). But, as always, he makes one point which makes my hackles rise, which is point 1 – tabs should be used to select differing content within the same context, and not to select differing types of content, and he quotes Amazon as having made “that mistake”.

Hold on there a bit, Jakob. Usability is about the users ability to navigate the website in front of them logically and quickly. I (and many others) find the arrangement of a set of horizontal tabs to quickly and easily find the section of the site we’re interested in is a perfectly viable solution. And Amazon almost break ‘rule’ 10 too – the one about only having a single row of tabs. Amazon feature a second navigation row, context sensitive, under the tabs. So in small area of screen real estate, all of the major and minor categories in Amazon’s huge stock can be shown. And this, to me, is a triumph of webdesign, and if Mr. Nielsen doesn’t like it, that’s his prerogative. It works for me, and for many millions of Amazon customers.