Posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 7:22am by Rob Wilkerson
This morning I was reading the second article in Smashing Magazine’s series on Web Form Design Patterns and I was surprised to read that the author(s) believe that “[…]it makes more sense to use a clear visual distinction between primary action buttons and secondary action buttons and introduce a significant amount of space to clearly separate them.” What makes sense to them feels counter-intuitive to me.
In my experience, “a clear visual distinction” usually takes the form of the primary buttons being dominant and the secondary being more, and usually too, subtle. It seems like the recent trend is to render the primary action buttons as, well, buttons and the secondary action buttons as text. I can’t be precise about how often I’ve accidentally clicked the dominant button (for no other reason than because it’s just so…dominant) when I meant to click the other, but suffice to say that it’s a big number. One day I almost spent an extra $100 for up to 2” of extra legroom while checking in for a flight online simply because of the “primary button” issue.
What? You think the airline planned that? How cynical of you.
Anyway, that’s been my experience. I can’t imagine I’m alone in that. I’d argue that if a distinction is considered necessary then care should be taken to ensure that the distinction itself is subtle. Making the primary action buttons significantly larger or “hiding” the secondary action buttons is very much the opposite of subtle.
user interface, usability
Posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 1:09pm by Rob Wilkerson
From Joel Spolsky’s post with the same name:
Don’t do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work.
I’m going to have to beg to differ with Joel on this. Or at least with his seemingly all-or-nothing stand on it. Of the myriad of problems that exist in all of the user interfaces that are so prevalent in our world, I don’t think this problem is really a problem. I’m not arguing that disabling menu items is right, necessarily, but maybe that it’s not bad. And certainly that it’s not so bad that we should “outlaw” it. A minor distinction, perhaps, but I don’t think it’s simply splitting hairs.
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usability, user interface
Posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 7:06pm by Rob Wilkerson
I’ve had two big problems with Spaces up to and including 10.5.2:
- When Command-Tab’ing to an application, Spaces would shift me to a different Space that already included a window of that application rather than allow me to open a new window in my current space. More »
- When I had multiple windows of an application open in multiple desktops, Command-Tab’ing didn’t, by default, place the focus on the window of that app that was open in the same desktop I was already in. It didn’t do anything, really. It’s like that action confused the OS. More »
After a while, I was able to track down a fix – and by fix, I really mean glorified hack – for the first problem (which seems to have a real fix in 10.5.3 via a System Preference, by the way) and 10.5.3 seems to have addressed the second quite nicely.
Zang.
usability, mac, spaces
