We have a pop-up menu with 3 tabs. All three tabs rank in importance. When clicked on an element in a page, you get a pop-up with the first (base) tab active where you see all the information you actually need. In some cases you want to click on another tab in that pop-up, although that's not that often. In even more extreme cases, you want to access a third tab, which contains very specific and somewhat sensitive information that we would like the users to access only as a last resort. In that sense, how can we make such tab less accessible to the user so he wouldn't enter it without the need for it?
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1Is there really even a problem to solve here? If the user doesn't need the info, then they won't click on them. It's not like you are trying to make it secure, so it's up to the user if they want to see if or not. Can you perhaps explain why it matters if the user looks at them or not?– musefanCommented Aug 10, 2020 at 10:49
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Yes there is. The information that is displayed there makes it easier for the user to solve whatever problem he has, but we don't want him to get the easy solution first before he can find out more information in other tabs himself. However, we also don't want to explicitly prohibit him to enter the tab.– VelionisCommented Aug 10, 2020 at 11:39
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It still seems like a strange requirement. Can you provide an example of the type of data? At the end of the day, if the user wants to skip the hard work and get the easy answer then making some buttons less obvious isn't going to stop that. Once they know how to do it once, they will know every time– musefanCommented Aug 10, 2020 at 11:56
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1 Answer
This seems to be less making things "less accessible" and more like informing the user that this menu contains information which is not needed so often.
You could de-emphasise the tab visually, through colour and size, or even grouping by perhaps putting the tab to the far right and leaving a gap between the most common and least commonly accessed tabs.
Alternatively, you could look at your information architecture, you mention a hierarchy in terms of importance but your current approach displays each tab at the time hierarchical level. You could perhaps nest the data, so put the least important one as a subsection of the more important ones.
You also mentioned sensitive information, perhaps combined with the second approach you could use negative wording, colours etc to "warn" the user of this area is sensitive. This may cause the users to be wary of the contents. Sites like GitHub do this for destructive actions as an example:
