Button-style tabs do not fit with rest of the system and are unituitive

Do not clutter Launchpad with that kind of shit.

MacOSX use tab bars consisting of buttons for ages, and noone has died from it yet.

@AsstZD: To maintain a respectful atmosphere, please follow the code of conduct - http://www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct/ . Everyone has the right to share his/her opinion. You have that right too, but you should respect other people's opinion.

@Asst

The issue is the consistency.
The fact that OS-X has tabs-as-buttons in the center, is pretty random.
If they want to properly copy OS-X, they have to copy the guidelines, not the screenshots.

The guidelines, just a guess, decided that document-tabs and application-section-tabs have to look different, because they behave different. Then, whatever random solution was chosen to differentiate those two different types of tabs, it was applied consistently throughout the desktop.

The issue people have have with these buttons as tabs, is that it's the only place in the whole Ubuntu desktop that uses them. People are conditioned to think twice before pressing a button.

In the visual language, a button means 'action'. You do something destructive to the model. (which in this particular case would be the account setup of Ubuntu One). A tab button however, communicates an update to the viewer. People click on tabs out of curiosity, even when they don't know what the word means, or what it's exactly about. It's always safe to do.

Buttons not so much. You wouldn't press a button you don't understand.

Now changing the interface to consistently use buttons as tabs for application sections, can be a choice. But only if that decision is applied throughout the desktop, will the user be properly conditioned that it's pretty safe to click those, and look around.

And being able to look around and browse the full functionality of an applications, helps the user get a mental model about the interface.

In this particular case, the user-interface is simply horrible. People just speak out about the buttons-as-tabs, because it is the biggest violation. But it's definately not the only one.

The fact that user-interface breaks the consistency of the desktop is bigger problem, than the actual choice. I don't think anybody would mind, if this applied consistency.

But it isn't at the moment. Together with Unity, which doesn't use GTK itself, i think the designers have made it very difficult for them to make the user feel in control. All these different interfaces differ too much to look so much alike. In the end you get the typical 'pop & mom' windows user, that use muscle memory to interact. It's like when you go a French bar and learned the phrase 'Je voudrais une bierre'. You've been told this will get you a beer, but you don't actually know what you are saying.

In the case of Windows, this is overcome by people taking 5 to 10 years to learn how to do pretty mundane tasks. I don't think people will ever have that kind of patient with the Linux desktop.

So, yes, this is micro issue. Who really cares about just the Ubuntu Control Panel. But it's also an artifact of a much larger issue. The design teams, needs to start setting up strict guidelines. Perhaps even publishing them, so it's easy for external application developers to stick the same conventions.

And as has been states on OMGUbuntu; this design was based on a pixel-perfect design. ( a print design ). That might not be the most successful way to design a consistent user-friendly interface.

Perhaps we can split up this bug report, into two different bugs?

(1) about it "being inconsistent"
(2) about it "being unintuitive, even when this change would theoretically be applied to all application-section-tabs in all programs"

Because only of them is an opinion.
And that one is pretty moot, until there is an intent to setup, or at the very least document, Ubuntu's Design Guidelines.

Sure, it is unintuitive by nature, because it doesn't group the contents. But that's a minor detail, and indeed an opinion, compared the undeniable fact that it's inconsistent. And that if this is deemed to be the better design, this should be implemented on a toolkit level, and apply to all application-section-pages.

Either way fixes this bug for me.
Hence the reason I argue this bug be split into two bug reports.

Thank you very much for the feedback raised in this bug report.

The bug will be postponed for review in the next cycle and we will combine it with the results of the usability testing we have scheduled for April (and further rounds beyond that) in order to help inform the next phase of design.

As you may have noticed, the Ubuntu One product has been undergoing quite a number of changes and many improvements to support it delivering on its potential and we have been working closely with the Ubuntu One team to work towards delivering their vision for the whole product experience.

The design decision on the treatment of the tabs stands. Its future inclusion or otherwise in a toolkit remains unclear, only once we are confident that this has reached a point at which standardisation is an appropriate next step will we move to propose changes at a toolkit level.

Thanks for the response Ivanka.

"The design decision on the treatment of the tabs stands."

It appears that there's nothing we can do to change this at this point, but I'm still curious to hear the rationale behind the decision.