I'm setting up some options/settings pages for a wordpress theme. There are a lot of options and I think splitting them up will help navigating the different controls. I'm thinking of splitting the controls in to different tabbed groups, my problem is deciding how to split the controls across different tabs. There is no obvious logical grouping, the settings are mainly unrelated to eachother and not all users will use or even understand all of the settings.
Some options:
Keep all the controls on one page. This means a lot of scrolling and is visually too busy and hard to navigate.
Split the controls in to very specific tabbed groups - with a lot of relatively empty tabs. From experience I think this is easier to navigate on larger screens but less so when there isn't enough screen space to accommodate all the tabs. The contrast between the large number of tabs and the few controls in each tab also doesn't work visually in my opinion.
Split the controls in to more manageable sized tabbed groups. This visually seems the best option, but can mean using very general groupings that don't really help navigating the options.
I understand this will vary depending on the specific case and controls being grouped - so, assuming there is no obvious logical way to split the controls in to manageable sized groups, what is the best approach? What other approaches are there to splitting settings/controls?
Answer
Your second option is the best. Follow what WooCommerce do, they have one of the largest sets of options of any plugin, and they group them logically, not caring if one tab just has one option:
Tab contents for usability need to be grouped logically. The label at the top needs to be able to succinctly describe what will be laid out in that tab.
From Jacob Neilsen's Tabs, Used Right:
It logically chunks the content behind the tabs so users can easily predict what they'll find when they select a given tab.
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