Projects/Usability/HIG/Accordion

Purpose

The accordion (in Qt also known as tool box) provides a column of tabbed panels. Similar to tabs only a single item is shown at once.

Guidelines

Is this the right control

• Use an accordion for content with mutually exclusive views. That might be a calculator with simple vs. scientific vs. statistical layout, or a digital vs. analog clock, for instance.
• Do not use an accordion to structure content by default. Rather use a list view with associated pages or tabs.
• Consider to replace the accordion by another control since KDE makes very rarely use of this type of navigation.

Behavior

• Do not mix the accordion with other types of navigation on the same level.
• Do not use more than one accordion in your application because it is clutter prone.
• Make sure that accordion contains of at least one panel.
• Do not add more than five panels to an accordion.

Appearance

• Each panel must contain a panel header with descriptive label.
• Do not use icons in panel headers.