Comments on: Should Your Online Store Use Tabbed Boxes?

By: Christian Rothe

Christian Rothe — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:00:46 +0000

IMHO it should not be a “all-on-one-long-page” OR “tabbed layout” decision. I believe that a combination of BOTH is the right approach.

Every product page contains “Priority 1″ and “Priority 2″ information. We put Priority 1 content (“everything most customers need to know”) in the visible scrolling area and Priority 2 stuff (“additional information”) in the tabbed area. In other words: we use the best of both worlds: Everything important is constantly visible and it is no harm if less important information is overlooked.

Our product pages look like this: http://www.laufstar.de/product_info.php/info/p207_CEP-Running-Socken-mit-Kompression–Herren-.html

By: Christopher Foote

Christopher Foote — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:56:35 +0000

Tabs are fine for frequent customers but new customers may miss a lot. I would try to avoid them if you can.

By: John Roberts

John Roberts — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:32:52 +0000

Nice post, on a topic we’ve discussed several times. Sso far, stuck with a single long page. Haven’t been able to test the other alternative some mention here: separate pages. Been hesitant to try that because want the SEO benefits for a product to accrue to a single location, rather than scattered across (for example) a technical specs page, an application instructions page, and so on.

Maybe a topic for the future?

Amazon is training web buyers to just keep scrolling, most of the time.

By: Linda Bustos

Linda Bustos — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 02:16:55 +0000

Thanks for all your comments and links. To be honest I was expecting this to be a controversial post with some strong disagreements from folks defending their tabs

By: eCommerceCircle

eCommerceCircle — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 21:43:51 +0000

Leah Culver from Six Apart had a great write up on the last point of Login/Register screens:

By: Audio Bible

Audio Bible — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:13:33 +0000

Personally I often miss the tabs, and I consider myself fairly computer savvy. I think web designers like tabs better, they are cooler looking, they do something when you click on them, etc…

From a usability stand point, I think users are more comfortable scrolling down the page instead of looking for tabs.

If they do not easily see it, they do not spend a lot of time looking for it, in tabbed format.

Just my 2 cents…..

By: Christian, Baymard Institute

Christian, Baymard Institute — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:23:14 +0000

Hey Linda, great question. In all usability tests I’ve ever done the users always tend to overlook tabs.
If you are forced to make tabs then at least obey to web conventions and make the links blue and underlined to minimize the “banner blindness” that occur when decorating your tabs.

BTW thanks for the tweeting of our “lower your chargeback rate”-blogpost.

By: Björn

Björn — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:39:54 +0000

Many thanks for your Explanations.
This year we’ve relaunched our shop and during designing we often asked ourselfs to use tabbed boxes. But our decision was nearly almost “no” so there are only on the homepage some kind of tabbed boxes just to keep the homepage in short length.

Now we are satisfied with it.

By: Marshall

Marshall — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:24:36 +0000

Thanks for this article. It confirms what I’ve suspected, but does so at a good time.

My company’s home page is waaaaaaayyyyyyy too wordy. There’s a huge amount of information there, and the biggest problem is that it’s all important. We know we need a redesign, but haven’t figured out the best way yet.

One solution I’ve been reluctantly considering is breaking it into tabs. But I suspect that either people just won’t see them or (in order to solve that) they’ll be horribly stick-outtish.

You’ve reaffirmed my reluctance and we’re just going to have to find a way to break it into other pages. At least people expect the navigation area to have links. They’ll be more likely to click them there.

By: Justin Palmer

Justin Palmer — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:49:22 +0000

Great topic Linda, one that deserves much attention in the design community.

Since redesigning our product page on C28.com, I’ve noticed quite a few comments from customers who thought we removed features that are now behind tabs. We’re working on a/b testing a long, scrolling product page vs. the tabbed design. My gut tells me the tabbed version will lose.