August 8, 2000: I've gotten some interesting suggestions in reply to my multiple views query. I haven't come up with anything really satisfactory yet, but I think I have a better idea of what I want:

I guess the main point is that you need some control which presents all the choices (radio buttons, tabs, not pulldowns), conveys exclusivity (pulldowns, radio buttons, not tabs), /and/ looks like it would control the UI (tabs, not radio buttons or pulldowns).

The closest thing I've seen is on bigstep.com, where they use pairs of buttons.. the active of which appears to be pushed in:



Trouble is, I can never figure out which one is selected, but I think that's probably a visual design issue which could be fixed. (Yeah, I know these are just radio buttons, but they look like they would change the UI, which regular radio buttons do not.)