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.

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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Part of my conversation with the guys from Wesabe (now going on two weeks ago because I haven’t been feeling the urge to write much lately) revolved around their search feature. There’s been much ado about search in the Wesabe groups lately and rightfully so. It’s one of the mistakes that I think they made.

The gist of the aforementioned ado was that the search box simply didn’t work. The search box existed in the site header which I understood to mean that I could search the entire site, or at least the site’s public data and my own private data. No matter what I tried to search for, though, no results were ever found. And, to be clear, I wasn’t searching for “portuguese fur trade” or “yachting”. I was searching for content that I knew existed.

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I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta 4 on two different Macs – one at work and one at home – and have noticed a couple of things:

1. The Good

I really like the new Remember This Password implementation. I don’t know if this is new to beta 4, but I just noticed it a few days ago. Instead of the modal prompt that used to pause the form submission until the prompt was acknowledged, the new implementation uses the “activity bar” at the top of the page that’s become so familiar for other interactions.

What makes the new implementation so nice is that it doesn’t halt the submission process. That means that I can wait to find out whether my credentials actually worked before making a decision about whether to save them. If they don’t, I can click Not Now and try again.

It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a very nice convenience feature.

2. The Curiously Bad

One of the Macs with beta 4 installed was upgraded from beta 3. The other is a new install of beta 4. What’s curious and unpleasant about this is that the chrome is different. The toolbar of the new beta 4 install includes the conspicuously IE7-inspired, Jurassic-sized Back button.

I’m not a fan. I much prefer the toolbar that was part of my beta 3 install (and was retained during the upgrade).

Update 4/3/2008: Bill Mill set me straight in his comment below. Although I still don’t like the tumescent Back button, it’s easily reversed. To do so, right click on the Firefox toolbar and select Customize…. Then just check the option to Use Small Icons and the Back button will return to a reasonable size.

Although beta 5 was released today, I haven’t upgraded. The response I’ve heard has been mixed (good UI, but crash prone) so I think I may sit out this release cycle.

I’m just saying.

(credits: ffffound.com via Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan)