meeting minutes from last night

[Asgeir Frimannsson]

On Wednesday 20 August 2008 11:42:43 Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Asgeir Frimannsson wrote:
> > I'm wondering if the left-side tabs are taking too much prime real-estate
> > on the page?
>
> The original mockups for Fedora applications including the tabs were
> designed for 800x600. I think 1024x768 is a more realistic standard
> these days. Since the design works fine in 800x600 I am not too worried.
>
> They are on the left side, because especially in cases of i18n, things
> can get long and if you have horizontal tabs, it really limits how many
> total tabs you can have. If the tabs run vertically and their labels can
> line wrap, then you can have more tabs as the number of tabs grows
> vertically which is pretty much limitless (although of course you don't
> want ridiculous numbers of tabs.)
>
> I've worked on a couple of web apps where the main nav was horizontal
> tabs across the top, and it did cause a lot of problems as we ran out of
> space a few times and had to completely readjust and shuffle things
> around to stick to only the 6-7 items that would fit horizontally across.
>
> > I think the point I'm trying to make is that the overall theme that the
> > applications plug into shouldn't steal the attention or real-estate away
> > from the real use of the page. Does this make sense?
>
> It makes sense, and although I don't agree that they steal attention
> inappropriately, there are ways of toning down the tabs if it does
> become an issue. Fair enough, because these designs haven't been tested
> on users yet. It sounds like your concern is more for the visual
> treatment of the tabs than their placement, and the visual treatment can
> certainly be tweaked somewhat. If you have suggestions let's talk
> through them.

I was more thinking of this from a development point-of-view. The tabs do eat 
space that could be better used for the main functionality of the application. 
I'm thinking of this in terms of the L10N infrastructure specifically, where we 
do need as much horizontal space as possible for the main application (e.g. 
translation statistics, transifex submission, online translation)... I would 
limit the overall 'theme' to a smaller and less intrusive 'frame' of the 
application, e.g. how Google separates its' services (horizontal <20px bar on 
top). I do really like the overall theme of the page though :)

But again, I totally agree with you, I do have developer goggles on, and user-
based testing would be a better approach to determining this:)

cheers,
asgeir