NewHuman: Lack of usability - active tab should have some extra visual clue

I'm the responsible for this change. Unfortunately the old look was not consistent with the rest of the widgets, and that kind of solution made me quite happy.
There's no reason why the active tab should have a stripe to increase visibility (see windows vista, mac osx leopard, firefox... etc etc), but at the same time having those visible it's not necessary a regression. So I agree partially with you.

We can find other solutions, like changing the text and the color of the inactive tabs.

Yes, you're right: In the current dark theme - although efficient - a stripe
might not be the most visually/aesthetically pleasing element. OSX / Vista
don't have stripes, but then again, their themes aren't this dark.

Your solution seams reasonable. Changing the font face for inactive tabs,
or, perhaps adding some hints of color to the active tab, or even making
it brighter than the inactive tab, might do the trick.

Thanks.

IMHO it's not the orange stripe at the top, but the greater differentiation between the colors of the tabs that help tabs in Clearlooks easier to determine current vs inactive tabs.

In return, I would suggest lightening up the "active" tab in the new dark theme a bit (particularly around the edges where we need to be able to quickly see the difference between active and inactive), but not so much as to require a move away from the original color of the text (I don't think aesthetically the text should change in any way) would go a long way to providing this clarity.

I really think it needs to be much easier to find the active tab, this can probably be accomplished in many different ways. Shipping as-in is unacceptable though, I find myself very frustrated after using this theme for a few minutes.

Also note that the difference in color between different TAB backgrounds might very well look different on different monitors so dont assume that just because the background colors look sufficiently different on one machine that it applies to all machines.

I have a large monitor with high resolution (1920 x 1200), and without the yellow stripe it is very hard to notice which tab that is active. Firefox is currently very hard to use together with NewHuman/DarkRoom.

What was the inconsistency that made you remove the yellow stripe?

We did not change anything in the theme (gtkrc). The engine author removed the stripe.

So there is nothing the theme author can do to compensate for the removed stripe?

I believe that something could be added such as the active tab is lightened, oters darkened.

-----Original Message-----
From: Sverre Johansen <email address hidden>
Sent: October 15, 2008 4:22 AM
To: <email address hidden>
Subject: [Bug 275271] Re: NewHuman: Lack of usability - active tab should have some extra visual clue

So there is nothing the theme author can do to compensate for the
removed stripe?

--
NewHuman: Lack of usability - active tab should have some extra visual clue
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/275271
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Artwork Team, which is the registrant for human-theme.

I have added more contrast between the active and inactive tabs in the package in my ppa...test it out and let me know if this is enough.

Ah! Now its much easier to spot active tabs. I think it has the just-fine
amount of contrast between active and inactive tabs.

At least for me, this usability bug is solved.
Should I keep you ppa package installed, or must I uninstall it to correctly
receive an upgrade via the standard mirrors ?

Thanks!

I'm the engine author, I've made this change and it wasn't an irresponsible decision: no one said that having a highly selected tab (with stripe) is the way it should be. A lot of designers/usability engineers, don't agree with that.

Personally I'd like having some differences between selected and not active tabs, but not too much. With clearlooks I've done a good job. With murrine I was forced to remove those stripes, but you can achieve a good result too.

As you can see, stripes are not necessary.
http://avencius.nl/images/Kestrel_Vista.png
http://www.maximumpcguides.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/12/2vista_taskbar_properties.PNG
http://alexseifert.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/firefox-3-beta-1.png
http://davidnaylor.org/temp/firefox-2-default.png