Navigation in Designing: Tabbed navigation help an user to answer many essential questions without thinking, Where am I? Where else can I go? How much other stuff is there? The idea of “Tabs” comes from the use of tabs in folders or filing cabinets. Like a Website, we do not flip through a filing cabinet page by page looking for the right piece of information. We tele port in a vague sense by flipping to a tab. If we are looking at a page in a file, we can easily check to see what file it is a part of. Likewise, we can easily see where we are in the scheme of things by looking at the other files. If it’s done right works very well in an interface.
While planning navigation, it’s easy to focus on the “Where can we go” part of the equation and totally forget about explaining where the user currently is. It’s very important to include both the current location as well as the possible destinations. It’s much more unmanageable to navigate with no relative location. Well designed tabs clearly point out the current location with active states, or visual appearances that set them apart from inactive tabs. Active tabs can be highlighted by color, size, and font-weight between other things. And often, tabs visually connect with the content of a web page. This will hold to stronger the idea of a connection among the page and the active tab, just as one would expect with a filing cabinet.
Using the tabs for primary navigation we can be useful for connecting users with the most important parts of a website without loosing them in the clutter of secondary and tertiary navigation. If there are five primary navigation links, and each with five secondary level links, there are simply too many choices stopping an user from making a quick decision. There are many ways to reduce the number of choices, but with tabs it becomes easy to associate a primary and secondary levels, and keep the other benefits of a tabbed navigation.
Tabs are necessary to limited with primary and secondary levels of navigation. If they provide an user with the ability to flip among areas of the same content, they can prove more useful. Combined with technology that switches content without even reloading a page can instill a tangible feel to the end user navigating the page.