Tuesday, November 19, 2019

layout - Too many tabs - use buttons instead?


We have an admin page in our application that has toomanytab-itus (see the second set of tabs are stacking):



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I've been tasked with solving this issue. Reorganising/grouping the content to reduce the number of tabs was my first choice but this is looking too expensive to implement. So my cheap and cheerful solution is to simply replace the tabs with buttons:


enter image description here


My boss is concerned this will be an unfamiliar mechanism to users. Does anyone have any examples of where this sort of approach has been used before? or any other solutions to the too many tabs problem?


UPDATE


Thankyou for all the feedback and answers. I have come up with a different solution based on all your useful feedback, which groups areas into fewer, more user-friendly tabs and any sub-options are dealt with with a link bar.


enter image description here



Answer



I think I see how it works now: it controls the displayed attributes of various pages of a system eg "on the advanced search page I want to display these attributes" etc. If that is the case then I would probably advise grouping tabs together: one tab for viewing pages, one page for results pages etc.


i also advise that if you introduce the possibility for many opportunities to control display elements, as is the case here, you're introducing the possibility that lots of pages will follow different display conventions and this is risky...



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