> I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers > like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the > nav

> I’ve certainly encountered this attitude before. Mozilla UX designers > like to use the example of tabs-on-top: when we moved the tabs above the > navigation bar in Firefox 4, many users balked at the change. But nobody > could give a reason why tabs-on-top was worse — they just didn’t like it > because it was unfamiliar. It strikes me that the problem was in this case an interchange of mental model. Tabs on top implies that the location bar belongs to this tab. People were balking because they had mentally yoked it to the browser as a whole, "this is the part of the browser which tells you where you are," and now it was a part of the tab which mentioned where the tab is presently pointing. I think that's important to remember. The UI designer is always trying to give you a mental model for how their device works, and how the parts are causally connected. The "designer arrogance" is much more understandable when it applies to people who are merely upset that their mental model is changing. That is not the case with the facelift choices of changing text labels into icons, or removing borders and highlights. Those cannot be a valid occasion for this sort of arrogance.