Current mood:	aggravated
Current music:	The Wanderer - U2
Entry tags:	vmware

Selectively displaying non-essential UI components
I randomly ended up in a lively discussion about UI design at work today. At stake was the optimum way of selectively displaying UI components that are not usually of interest to the user. The means we evaluated included disclosure triangles, modal dialogues, and tabs.

Although others may disagree, I dislike modal dialogues because they feel restrictive, clutter the screen with additional windows and often make it hard to view all the information at once. Disclosure triangles are usually a good idea but when you have so many of them that expanding them all would cause the content within the window to exceed the available vertical space and force the user to scroll then they can actually degrade the user experience. Tabs do prevent the user from being able to view all the relevant data at once but they avoid the other downsides of modal dialogues and can be easier to navigate than a bunch of expanders.

Decisions like this make me wish that semantic UI layouts were a realistic option. Then I could just specify that certain components were optionally visible and let the layout engine decide how to render them at runtime. As we say in computer science, any problem can be solved by adding another layer of abstraction.