The Opposite of Fitts' Law | Hacker News Reader

The Opposite of Fitts' Law

codinghorror.com

98 pointsbdfh4251 comments

Another relevant example would be the voting arrows here on this site. I don't know about anyone else, but I have voted comments the wrong way on a number of occasions. Having some sort of obvious undo vote feature might be nice as well.

Are we using the same site right now? I see only "up" votes, so how could you possibly make the mistake of making a "down" vote?

Downvote arrows appear after you hit a certain karma level.

I think you need 200 karma before you can start downvoting.

The target may shifts over time, as karma inflation goes its course.

I've given up voting here on my iPhone for this reason - I hit the wrong arrow too many times. Either the arrow size/proximity or the lack of an undo feature have to go.

I make that mistake all the time, especially on my iPhone, and I always experience a pang of regret when I downvote a comment I actually really liked. Why can’t you change your vote?

I noticed too that there is no possibility to undo a vote. People make mistake, voters too. The Stack Overflow way to do it is preferable, but I guess it cost more resource.

Another example is OS X's active screen corners.

If I set the upper right corner to something useful, like 'Beam me up Scotty', I have about a .5 probability of transporting back to the Enterprise when I really wanted to find a file.

Active corners are cool, but they make a couple other functions difficult to use.

When I set up an active screen corner action, I always go for the top-right corner first, because that's the corner my cursor is least likely to hit. I always bring up the spotlight menu with the keyboard, because there's nothing useful to do with it without moving my hands to keyboard anyways. Since search results can be picked using the arrow keys, there's no need to move your cursor away from the part of the screen that you're working in.

I've run into that problem occasionally with the upper-left corner when I'm just trying to go to the app's menu bar. I don't run into it with Spotlight because that's practically the only thing up there, and I just use command-space to open Spotlight.

For at least 10 years I've wanted to have a GUI version of this switch:

http://awaregeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/panikknap.jp...

(This is the best picture I could find, ideally I'd want the switch to be facing the person.)

I think it'll be possible to do something like this in-browser, with an animation that shows the plastic cover opening.

One way to achieve that would be to make the user check a confirmation box before enabling the submit button. I've used this in a couple places and I've never seen it confuse anyone.

I was doing my taxes the other day and clicked a button to import some information. It automatically upgraded me from the free version of the tax software (which doesn't have that specific functionality) to the paid version -- no confirmation, no "are you sure?", no undo function.

Had I not been planning on upgrading to the paid version anyway, I'd have been really, really upset.

Compare this to, say, Amazon. In order to purchase something, I add it to my cart, and then go through a checkout process, which clearly details what I'm buying and lets me remove stuff from my cart. It's pretty dang hard to accidentally buy something on Amazon.

Having an "enable" checkbox or a post-click "are you sure you want to [clear description of what you clicked]?" confirmation are great ways to help users avoid accidentally deleting something they wanted to send, or sending something they wanted to save, or buying something they wanted to remove from their cart.

That problem with the tax software does not sound like something to be kept secret. What were you using?

H&R Block's online version.

The initial page actually did say that to import the info required an upgrade, but it was poorly worded, and the lack of a confirmation or undo option was frustrating. I put in a complaint to their customer service guys, who said that the only way to go back to the free version is to register a new account.

Like I said, had I not actually planned to upgrade to the paid version partway through the process, I'd have been extremely angry and probably gone to one of their competitors.

Not an "opposite" so much as another way of thinking about Fitts', but this is definitely important when designing interfaces.

Those who use Outlook will probably agree that the "Reply All" button is just a bit too close to the "Reply" button.

Hotmail does the same with "New | Delete | Junk"

My CMU webmail recently moved the Delete button to the middle of the button bar, as far away from other buttons as possible. It's practically impossible to misclick, unless you're clicking around with your eyes closed.

>Like, say, the "delete all my work" button?

Why on earth would an application designer provide a non-recoverable way to delete everything in the first place?

Because you're leaving their hosted service and you don't want them to continue datamining your documents?

That's a very good reason. Thanks for replying!

Having a "delete all my work" button and doing datamining are not mutually exclusive...

The "delete all my work" button might mean "make my stuff inaccessible for me and all normal users".

Any time I see a feature like that on an app, I think that enough people must have asked the support team to do that for them that it became easier to provide a function for that on the UI.

Either that or the app developers just tossed in whatever features they could think up. Depends on how much credit I give the developers.

And the software equivalent of the switch cover, the confirmation dialog ...

(which, coming to think of it, works the opposite way - instead of "enable, activate", it's "activate, confirm")

Picking on Google Mail is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. I use Gmail, and I like many of it's qualities, but it has a UI that seems to have been designed by a 9 year old boy on his first experiment. It's laughably random, or perhaps 'eccentric'.

Really? I've never seen a better webmail interface than Gmail's. Can you justify your claim by providing some of "it's" qualities that are so laughable?

I hate to get into a flamewar but 90% of the themes they are so proud of break basic usability guidelines: Too distracting, not enough contrast between read and unread items, ignoring color theory for the meaning of colors used in the interface, etc. Drives me crazy.

Edit: And as I posted to my Tumblr (http://ajh.us/GmUI) just 5 days ago:

> Today I opened a Gmail window. At the top of the screen, I saw a yellow message beginning, “Hey, this is important! …” I never finished reading it because I had clicked something else (a message) and the supposedly important message disappeared, never to be seen again.

> So the Gmail team either

> 1. Lied about the importance of the message, or

> 2. Totally failed to make me actually read it.

> Not so impressive UI design.

I've seen 'Hey, this is important!' before: on a gmail account that had its password compromised. I seem to recall that it was 'you might be compromised, you should verify your secondary address for account recovery' You might want to check your Gmail usage log at the bottom of the window, check your secondary address, and change your password.

Oh, it's because they think the account is compromised? Huh. I've had that message a few times before, noted that yes, that is the recovery address I told them about and yes, it's wrong, but no, I won't update it just because it's been a while. If I had known they asked because they noticed I'd logged in from a new location, I would have updated the record.

I can tell what you're thinking. Did he click Send or Save Now? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement of composing that angry email, I kind of lost track myself. Good thing we can easily undo a sent mail! Oh wait, we totally can't. Consider my seat, or at least that particular rash email, ejected.

If you ever wished you could undo that sent email, there's an "Undo Send" feature in Gmail Labs which you can enable.

Works only for emails sent to other gmail addresses, I guess?

It just delays sending for a few seconds I guess. It shows the same orangy notification on top of the page as when you delete a message with a link to undo the send

No, it works for all email addresses. It basically just waits for a few seconds before actually sending.

As I recall, it was an April fools prank not long ago.

Yes, might have been. But the feature in the April fools prank was much more elaborate as far as I remember. The actual feature is useful enough, though.

>If you ever wished...

For about 10 seconds after you hit 'send'. I'm assuming all they do is hold the message a bit before starting delivery.

But of course :)

As compared to a 'Enterprise' e-mail system, where I can retract any e-mail that has not yet been read by the recipient, even if it's hours later, without leaving bread crumbs in the recipients mailbox(s).

That's a real nice feature that I'll sorely miss if I end up at an 'Enterprise' that uses a web based mail system.

Sure, assuming that the recipient is on the same system as you. Good luck picking out the breadcrumbs from a contact outside the company.

Which is another user interface issue. After doing this a few times internally a user may come to rely on this feature and be uncomfortably surprised to find that it doesn't work on emails outside the company.

It's not really relevant to the point he's trying to make but a simple low-tech hack is to write your message first, then put in the recipients email addresses.

With no email address, any accidental send will fail.

I do this for new emails, but it's kind of cumbersome for replies.

I include the email addresses but append ".invalid", which achives the same result.

I tell mutt to automatically sign + encrypt outgoing email. Since I so rarely send mail to people who have PGP keys, mutt almost always asks me to pick a recipient key before it'll send.

Know what I do?

Pay the fuck attention to and consider my actions prior to performing them. And don't sloppily click wherever on the screen.

Though I disagree with your standpoint, you comment might have had some value in the discussion, if it wasn't for the profanity and personal attack.

Another good trick is that if you want to comment privately on someone else's email, always forward, never reply.

That way you reduce the risk of accidentally emailing it to the person you're talking about.

This is true, but having to enable a GMail labs feature is a heck of a workaround for a simple UI issue.

That's a bit like saying let's put this vase right next to this punching bag and don't worry, if the vase breaks, we've got some glue over here. Obviously this is hyperbole, but I think it illustrates my point.

It would make much more sense to just separate the two very different elements. In fact, this is the point of this write-up and to offer a hackish workaround in lieu of a simple rearrangement is completely missing that point.

There is, and that's the first thing I thought, too.

But the point is that the controls are mis-placed on the screen. This specific example may have a work-around, but it's just that: a work-around. I don't know if the need for the "Undo Send" labs feature would go down if the UI was changed or not, but it'd be interesting to know.

Ha! Until you quoted it, I totally missed the reference! I guess he's not feeling lucky :-)

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