Challenge 02: Tab Interaction
This post is in response to an E-Learning Challenge — a weekly challenge presented by Articulate’s E-Learning Heroes Community. The goal of these challenges is to “learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolio.”
The Challenge:
Challenge 02 asks users to “show and share your best out-of-the-box ideas for an innovative tabs interaction.” The criteria was to create a 5-tab interaction (whoops…only made 4 – easy to add a 5th though), the tabs had to be on the left or right, and they had to be persistent over slides or layers.
The Process:
Looking back at what I learned from my first challenge, I wanted to come up with an idea before just throwing things up on a slide and trying to figure it out. I decided to go with a subject matter I am familiar with (poker) and felt that a listing of different poker hands displayed on various tabs would work well. What took me the longest was trying to determine what I would use as the tabs themselves. I like to build around a central theme and incorporate as much detail as I can, so I wanted to use something poker-related. I eventually landed on the back side of a playing card, with a hover effect that resembles someone lifting up the corner of their card – a frequent move in a poker game.
The hover state was achieved in Photoshop using the Transform > Warp feature. If I had spent a little more time on this challenge, I would have removed the red from the underside of the card. I also included a felt background, a font that had a poker feel to it, and some playing cards to display the actual hands. The final result turned out alright.
My Submission:
You can view my final submission here: Challenge 02: Tab Interaction
What Worked and What Didn’t?
For starters, I didn’t read the challenge closely enough otherwise I would have used 5 tabs instead of 4. I think what I came up with is fine, and it looks nice, but there’s nothing super “innovative” or “out-of-the-box” in this design. Solid, but not the best I could do. On the positive side, I do like the hover-state of the playing cards. The “peeking” effect turned out nice and fits in well with the theme.
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