techno.blog("Dion")

6 Responses to “Selected or Unselected?”

1. Anthony Eden Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 11:13 am

   Well, to me it looks like Street Map is selected and Aerial Image can be clicked on.

2. Anonymous Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 11:13 am

   The very slight highlight on the “Aerial Image” tab would appear to make it stand proud (rather than being flat or recessed), so I figure thats the one you can click on. Maybe easier to tell with more context…

3. Howard Lewis Ship Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 1:35 pm

   Really need to see a thrid option to be able to tell, or more of the environment. It isn’t quite fair to expect us to tell from just this portion.

   Still, I often have the same problem with DVD menus. They’re so busy animating and glowing and showing us clips that it’s impossible to say what’s selected … even worse if you have an El Cheapo brand DVD player with sluggish response. “No! I don’t want it in Spanish with Mandarin subtitles!”

4. Jon Lipsky Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 1:38 pm

   Without seeing the rest of the image, it’s tough to really way. With whats shown, I would say the “Aerial Image” is selected since it’s more prominent, and the “Street Map” tab is greyed (thus in the backgound).

5. Tom Hawtin Says:
   January 3rd, 2007 at 1:54 pm

   To me Aerial Image looks like the current tag also the most clickable.

   That’s wrong, isn’t it? ;)

   Not an unusual situation. Standing forward in 2.5D GUIs affords pressability. Obviously for the tab metaphor, the selected tab marker is frontmost. What was wrong with nicely labelled columns of radio buttons?

   Not that conventional tabs ever seem to make much sense. I’m impressed with Firefox: It has tabs inside of tabs in its preference dialog.

6. Danno Ferrin Says:
   January 4th, 2007 at 10:51 am

   The rounded corner with the hard corners indicates to me that it should be a tab in a tabbed pane control, so what I would look for more than the color, highlight, or whether the button bubbles out or in would be to see which tab blended in to the frame control itself and which tab didn’t.

   However, I have a bad feeling that is is part of some AJAXy map control, so the tabs are likely parked in the upper right corner of the frame itself and are jutting into the image, not allowing it to be a full square. There is also the possibility that some photoshop jock who has not taken time to think about usability was asked to put a web page together and did it.

   But the ultimate usability for those two buttons? If i see realistic images: areal is selected. If I see artificial sticks and lines, then it is the street map.

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