A Word from Joel - Part 3
I’d like to comment on one final aspect of Joel Spolsky’s series of essays on User Interface Design for Programmers. At the end of Affordances and Metaphors, Joel explains that the tabbed dialog convention is incredibly successful in communicating with the user about how to transition between different option screens.
Why do I not adopt a tabbed interface convention? The following mockup, using the WordPress administration screen, shows why.
Firefox, Netscape, and soon Internet Explorer feature tabbed windows. The alisterjones.com website features tabbed navigation, which is a very popular navigation style. If Charlie’s administration screens adopt the same tabbed convention, then the user may end up viewing a screen featuring tabs within tabs within tabs. Users won’t be thanking me for that.
It is for this reason that I’d like for Charlie’s administration screens to clearly separate the browser from the contained website. This requires using an administration area that provides some visual space, and that features an interface convention that is different from the browser above and the contained webpage below.
While the above is still far from perfect, I do sense that the conversational interface convention has a lot to recommend it.
Still, my research on interface conventions is far from over.
by Alister Jones | Next up: An Explorer Interface Convention →
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