This blog post was originally written by Azwandi Aris and published on July 31, 2019. It was last updated on October 5, 2020.

You just left a meeting and agreed to write a content page about a new process your company will be implementing. You’ve taken complex thoughts and ideas and translated them into concise words, sentences, paragraphs… it's probably the most complete page you've ever written. After a couple of hours, you’ve managed to publish and share the link with everyone. You feel accomplished.

You tell yourself you deserve a coffee break. But right after you move away from your desk, you notice a coworker looking at the page you’ve just written. They scroll down the page. All they do is stare at it for a few seconds. And then bam! They close the page. No interest shown.

Your heart drops. You can’t help but think: “Why?!”

35% of desktop users leave a page before scrolling down at all. And the most viewed area of the page is just above the fold. (Chartbeat)

When you write a page in Confluence, you want your audience to read, understand, and find value in it. But how do you accomplish this?

Improve Content Experience with Tabs

Our customers have a common way of solving this problem. By using a simple tool called 'tabs', content creators can break up long content into tabbed sections. Any page can instantly become more readable, easier to skim, and understand.

Let’s look at some of the useful tips we’ve learned from our customers.

1. Segment content by audience

A common practice is to break up content into topics, but you can also segment by target audience. If you're writing a troubleshooting article, break it up into types of device, browser or operating system. If you're crafting a guideline, try dividing it into user roles, departments or groups. It would be easy for your audience to get the big picture and find the content that’s more relevant to them.

2. Segment content by timeline

Time-sensitive content like new staff on boarding and project planning can be broken up into weekly, monthly, or milestone tabs. This way, the audience gets to jump directly into any content relevant to the current timeframe. You can save them some time.

3. Track Jira issues without the clutter

If you use multiple Jira Issues macros for planning roadmap or tracking progress, those can easily fill up both the horizontal and vertical real estate of your page. Why not break it up into tabs so that the page shows one list of Jira issues at a time? A common practice is to create tabs by issue status, components, or assignees.

4. Drill-down using sub-tabs

You don't always have to stick to one set of tabs, you can create a subset of tabs too to create a content hierarchy and a sense of flow. Doing so allows your audience to drill down into more details as needed, while maintaining an organized look. Think about breaking up your project timeline into smaller milestones, high/low level QA test scenarios or business/department/team OKRs.

5. Auto-rotate the tabs

Here's a creative use for tabs. You can create a mini slideshow by setting some animation or rotation between the tabs, like a carousel. Great for displaying news on a homepage, weekly quotes, or a photo gallery.

Now that you've learned these tips, try applying tabs to your content. It instantly makes your pages look organized, readable, and more interesting to the readers’ eye. The next time you steal a peek at your coworker’s screen, you’ll most likely notice they’re paying much more attention to your page and and giving it a higher level of engagement.

About Composition Tabs for Confluence

Composition tabs for Confluence is more than just tabs. It's packed with features that help you turn complex content into pages that are easier to skim, read and understand. Create visually dynamic pages that highlight the most important information with features like big text, a hero image, categories, pinboards, instant focus, expandable sections, collections and page menus.  Improving audience engagement and content consumption has never been easier.

People love powerful, yet simple-to-use products that get the job done. We love building them.

We've got your back.