As much as the management decision to use SQLWindows bugged me, I was rather fond of its outline-based UI. As it happens, around this time I had also attended

As much as the management decision to use SQLWindows bugged me, I was rather fond of its outline-based UI. As it happens, around this time I had also attended a usergroup presentation demoing a beta test of OS/2 Warp. It incorporated a file manager with an outline metaphor. This inspired me to "invent" an outline-based UI for our own product that, a couple years later, turned out to be exactly what Microsoft did in Windows 95 for their File Explorer, except that I'd also included a type-ahead search at the top of the outline pane to search for nodes matching the input (there were quite a lot of nodes). Our management rejected my idea, though. Instead, their favored UI metaphor was tabs and pages, which was quite popular at the time. The thing is, such was the complexity of the data we were collecting (lots of outline nodes, as I mentioned) that this metaphor led to major tabs across the top of the window, minor tabs down the right side. Then they originally had a third row of sub-minor tabs across the bottom until someone realized that this broke the metaphor in the physical world - how could the metaphorical notebook be bound? So the sub-minor tabs were switched to be pages within the sub-tabs, using left and right arrow buttons to flip from one page to the next. I still maintain that the tabbed design was an unwieldy mess, and the outline-based one that I proposed, with the search on top, was vastly more usable.