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Sunday, October 04, 2009

Jumping Tabs (Needless Fanfare)

Another example of the Needless Fanfare anti-pattern. Do we really need tabs leaping up to meet your mouse?

6 comments:

Emil said...

This is way too much. Slight change of color does the job for most of us.

Tobin Harris said...

Hahah. I suspect that would definitely hinder usability.

I did something similar with the new yUML draw page (http://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy/class/draw2). The popup menus jump under the mouse when you click on them. This stops the user having to move their mouse as much. Do you think it's justified?

Anonymous said...

I sometimes think that things like this might be a symptom of what I might call "static comps effect." This is the phenomenon in a waterfall design process by which a graphic designer will take it upon themselves to design very different states of the UI to represent default, indicated and selected states. While these look fine as static comps presented individually, when they are put together in the final product they become confusing and unnecessary.

That said, you'd think they would have toned it down before it went live, but hey.

Unknown said...

Oh wow, I thought I've seen it all. Looks like piano keys...

james_nac said...

Reminds me of some cheezy online donkey kong type game. Hilarious.

sunsunich said...

I agree to james_nac's comment.
So 'super mario' or donkey kong. :)

Some people overdo discoverability.