Alt Tab

Tabs are the prefect example of an interface system that works for a while then breaks consistently. This happened to Amazon, now it's happening to Firefox.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/252991/mozilla-preparing-to-scrap-tabbed-bro...

There is more than one conceptual flaw with tabs: 

• A horizontal list is harder to scan than a vertical one; vertical lists put the iniital characters of all their content in a line so you can scan down to the proper initial, then start scanning across for detail.
• A horizontal list presumes something about the size of its content -- this is always poor strategy. My engineering bosses at Currenex tried to hammer this into my pint sized brain, to no avail.
• A horizontal list places its content as far apart as possible making it tedious to mouse to.

The original standard for web design was the "T" -- really more of an inverted "L"; the logo at left leads into the banner at top, and below that you have the navigation as a vertical list below.

Then things got wierd. People started using two columns for nav and mixing ad banners in, confiusing the readers as to the functionality of regions. Then along came tabs, which work wonderfully for a new content-light site, then just clot up and lead to wonderfully fucked things like sub-tabs and sub sub tabs.

The fact is that most "navigation" is done through one of three mechanisms -- and probably in descending order:

1. Navigation by Google -- following google links straight to the innards of your website
2. Following an interesting link off the home page, or a mailer
3. Using a site's "Search" system
4. Using a site's navigation.

Old Man Craig puts a half thousands links up front -- and that generally works. There's a reason for it: people don't like deep, iterative navigation; they don't like making logical leaps to find what they want. If it is not on the front page or on Google, it may as well not exist. This is less true for web applications -- but only less true: not false.

That is why the teaser approach works so well. Putting a link to a section is much less inviting than a section link over the most recent additions to the section in panel form. Concrete destination links work so, so much better than tabs, navigation and sectional link ins.That is the point I was trying to make with my Sears Fantasy Makeover.

The worst mistake you can make with a home page is to make it look like a magazine cover. You can on the internet presume that if they found your site at all your audience has some intrinsic interest in your content: pimp the content, not the design, on your home page and emphasize the newness of the new content and the hipness of the heavily trafficked page. Your home page should first and foremost be a clear readable collection of links to the content inside. It may be the most trafficked page on the site, from your audiences' POV it is nothing more than a gateway to the content they are coming for -- and their goal is to get off your front page AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. I.e., to them, the front page is a menu, not a piece of mareting. Help them do so: present a clear interesting list of options, and do not let the art department devour real estate with animation and branding.

Tabs, History and Bookmarks

The interesting thing about tabs is that they hearken to the About Face 2.0 "Save Paradox": that is, what is the difference between a tab that you open, a page that you visit and a bookmark you save? The reason you have tabs is to give you a quick way of visiting a page you visited before. They also create "stacks" of browsing history (Much like a window). However in that regard, they are almost counterproductive -- remembering which tab you had active when you visited a given page is pretty impossible if you use tabs to any degree.

So I would suggest that an iconic dock style stack at the right edge of a browser that you can open (with the page icon) would be as or more useful as tabs across the top of the screen. You should be able to decorate pages with bookmarks (the *) and enfolder them,potentially, as well as rate them "StumbleUpon style". The thumbnail approach I've seen on the google group for this project is good but I prefer an ordered vertical list for maximum compression.

Thumbnailing It

Thumbnails are great for quick flipbacks. UNLESS you are trying to find one page amongst many in the same domain, or a particular pagination of a dataset... while I like the thumbnail motif I feel if its not annotated with a compact text list, you are not going to get the best/widest possible view of your data. Also you really need fisheye over the focus to get the best amodal view of a given target.

My Alternative

Since tab switching is a quick and ittermittent task I would suggest a full page popup fisheye based in the upper right corner. This is already part of the Mozilla interface as a "Nearly Hidden" menu but I would prefer a visual navigator that takes advantage of the full page during navigation.

A more congested set of open files can be represented with two or three columns, with 2D fisheye allowing for emphasis under the cursor.

Tabs in Repose

You can reduce the list to an "Icon Peek" -- most pro sites are now branded with their icons and a "mini dock" (yes, I'm shamelessly ripping of Apple, deal) would give you the ability to quickly backtrack inside a specific domain without opening a modal dialog.