People like tabs because they recognize them for exactly what they are: a holdover from the days of file folders. Is this bad? No. Is this right– in the sense that the web has progressed past the days of being merely a document repository to a platform for really neat applications? Maybe not. But… it’s just comfortable. Everyone’s seen a file folder. It’s a physical object they’ve touched, they’ve used, they recognize. It makes sense.

And there’s the pitfall. Comforting the user just isn’t that exciting, is it? Jarring, unique layouts and controls are fun, they feed our creative drive– and there’s nothing that makes us right-brainers more pumped than making something only we really understand (comeon, admit it).

Now, this doesn’t mean we should necessarily have to use old favorites like tabs. This just means we need to make really good choices about what makes sense and what doesn’t. No matter how cool the control you’ve designed looks, no matter how neat its behavior is, if the user has to figure out that it does the same thing those comfortable old tabs do, they’ll give just give up.

Deciding you’re going to educate the user through some new, ground-breaking interface is risky business. User interface isn’t about educating, it’s about mind-reading– the wise and gentle designer is the one that knows the goal is figuring out how to make really neat things comfortable.

If you can do that– if you can present your neat design in such a way that it intuitively makes sense, it works, and it’s understood.. who knows, you just might change the world.

I’ve been up to my neck in tabs lately. User interface tabs, that is. Eventually every complex application hits the point where all (or at least a large portion) of the page content needs to be sliced up into categories that make sense being visually exclusive.

This is where tabs come in. I mean, everyone is doing it, and it’s been happening for a long time.

I don’t like them. I’m not sure I ever have. But I also know they work, people like them, and I’m not the user, so I shouldn’t pretend to be.

Replacing something that’s so comfortable and easy to grasp (that we really don’t like) with some new, neat design (that’s actually more powerful) is a difficult challenge. Sometimes it makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Update 2006-04-03: See, I gave in. Tabs here too, these days.