Alternate to tabbed screens ?

[fixthebug2003]

Hi,
We are building a GUI (Web Based Intranet) interface for a project that has many tabs in the Screen...which is really nice. When clicked on each Tab the respective screen information is displayed.But Some of the Tabs have information that again needs to be tabbed.?

Is there an alternative or better approach for displaying information when there are too many tabs withing another tabs..?

Fixthebug2003

 

[petey]

Good question. Tabs don't handle sub-navigation very well, so they're being abandoned by major portal designers in favor of other types of navigation. I can think of a couple examples, one being Ebay, who used a multi-level tab navigation scheme a few years ago. As far as I can tell they've since abandoned it. At my company, a huge effort was under way to redesign the main support portal, and they went through a phase where they tried to implement tabs, but at the end scrapped the idea because they don't scale with multi-level navagation. I think tabs should be relegated to simple navigation toolbars, and vertical-tree navigation should be used to handle the more complex stuff.

http://www.drpeterjones.com/

News and views of some obscure guy

 

[BabyJeffy]

This is a perfect question for a UI person to answer... there must be some research out there on this as well.

I'm about to put the intranet here through it's 3rd incarnation and we've ditched a tabbed approach in favour of normal dropdown (horizontal menu bar) menus (with sublevels). Our user tests (3 seperate tests with 3 different groups) all showed that this was more favourable than building tabs (with some extra sub navigation on the page).

We're in a "sandbox" environment here where everyone is using IE 5.5 or 6 for Windows (and they have Javascript enabled). If it weren't for that fact, we'd probably have opted for a vertical "tree navigation" solution (that is a lot easier to code -- even without having Javascript installed).

Interested in hearing from others on this.

Jeff