Swimming with the Razorfishes

Thursday, July 07, 2005

Poeple are going apeshit over the interface at DontClick.it. Some have even called it "excellent UI."

One of the things about UI designers that most annoys me is their dangerous tendency to confuse "I like it" or "isn't that cool" with "it is good UI."

Explore the UI at DontClick.it. Activate one of the links, like "Learn." Then decide you don't want to explore "Learn" and try to "back out" of the link. Wait for one of their "dialogs" to appear. See how easy it is to click the wrong choice.

The reason we click or release the mouse button is because these are gestures distinct from moving the pointer. Clicking the mouse intuitively says "take this action."

Removing the click gesture from the UI makes it less usable. It also makes things like drag and drop next to impossible.

The confusion of move and action gestures, added to the fact that UI elements move around the screen, makes the DontClick.it UI rather bad. It would be particularly baffling to less savvy users. If DontClick.it is claiming some kind of UI breakthrough, I'd love to see the results of user testing that they should have conducted.

1 Comments:

  • Yeah, the interface is impractical for most uses. But it does make for quite an entertainment and would probably be useful for telling some sort of story. Or for advertising. But it still will have to gove people some clickable areas because people are taught to click. Clicking just works.

    By Blogger Jeff Faria, at 6:25 PM  

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