Admin Interfaces: Tabs & scrolling Arrows for them

[Dmitry]

In-Portal and Intechnic designers - we need your expertise and involvement on these 2 things:


1. We need to decided and possibly adjust interface for Tabs that are used in Catalog, Item Edit pages or other Grids.

Currently they have Square, but as a part of proposed design update we have them Rounded. There are 2 complications with proposed Rounded tab design:

a. We have to use Images and Tables instead of Divs and pure CSS to format them nicely.
b. Currently all projects are using Square shaped tabs and they look pretty good. There is an option to improve Square looking tabs if need.


2. Also we are planning to introduce new functionality for tabs that will allows us have Scrolling when there many tabs and they simply can't fit into a single row. Introduced functionality will allow you to use Arrow Left and Arrow Right buttons to scroll through to see and click on all Tabs.

There are 2 questions:

a. Is it a good practice to hide Arrows when you are at the end and there nowhere to scroll further OR we can Grey Out that arrow.
b. We are NOT certain that current design/shape of the arrows really fits the Tabs considering that we might use to Square tabs instead of originally proposed Rounded ones.


Your comments highly appreciated!

Thanks.


DA.

-- -- Best Regards, Dmitry V. Andrejev

[Dmitry A.]

I am amazed, sounds like In-Portal users like the software so much
that they don't care how it looks or acts - they still going to love
it :)

[ky4ep]

Dima, I guess it is just you and me for now :) Sorry for not getting
to it sooner!

I agree that we should use CSS only for tabs/buttons. Can you show me
an example of what Alex has done so far so that I can help put
together nice design for them?

Here is what I put together, will this work:
http://groups.google.com/group/in-portal-design/web/catalog-final.png
?

If yes, we can use these as tabs throughout the system

As far as the question:

>a. Is it a good practice to hide Arrows when you are at the end and
there nowhere to scroll further OR we can Grey Out that arrow.

--- I would gray out the arrow

b. We are NOT certain that current design/shape of the arrows really
fits the Tabs considering that we might use to Square tabs instead of
originally proposed Rounded ones.

--- I personally' don't care about the design of the arrow as much. I
don't see us using it right now anyway. The idea was that we can use
the blinking arrow to show that the section contains items of another
types, not shown on the screen.

We can still revisit the dropdown idea (vs. scrolling) if you think it
will work better.

[Dmitry A.]

Andrew, thanks for taking time to draw this.

To be honest I liked the version of Square tabs that were used in
Projects so far.

Main things that I think are missing now:

a. Tabs are now Emphasized by the Border (as before)

b. I would have some white space between them so they are more noticed/
differ from background. Now they all look the same in one line.


May be it's just me? Guys, please give your opinion. We are kind of
sort on time so quick input would be appreciated.

DA.