One free interaction | Hacker News Reader

One free interaction

cooper.com

50 pointsbouncingsoul21 comments

I noticed two friends who use their mouse to repeatedly select and deselect text in web browsers as they read pages online. This is absolutely crazymaking for onlookers, but really satisfying for them.

I do this all the time. I hadn't ever really thought about it.

I do too. In fact, that paragraph was kinda freaky to read because I'd just gotten done highlighting it a couple times.

Thinking about it, I'm pretty sure I only do it on webpages and not in Word docs or PDFs. So I wonder if it's a way of compensating for the lack of visible vertical reference points in web text.

Like, with Word docs and PDFs there is a page divider that any given text is visibly distant from. Maybe the lack of that in long web text is a problem.

As the article mentions. I won't, usually, highlight text in a word processor because I'll sometimes drag the text somewhere.

The interaction isn't free.

Me too. It really irks my wife if she's onlooking. That'll teach her to onlook I guess :-)

I've seen this in another form too: people who repeatedly draw a selection box around desktop icons. It's usually a background task while thinking or talking about something else or on the phone.

This drives everyone else crazy, except when I am doing it on the New York Times website, in which case it tries to define all these words for me, which drives me crazy...

Me too, Dani! Add http://graphics8.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSear... to your adblock filter and it will drive you crazy no more.

Thanks!

Nice, thankyou.

Besides, if you wanted the definition of a word, you install Ubiquity, hit Cntl+Space and type "def". It's fast, easy and free of annoying pop-ups!

Me too.

And boy oh boy do we hate using the new york times website.

I also do this. At first, my girlfriend hated it. Now she has subconsciously started doing it herself. Just as planned.

I triple click to select the entire line/paragraph all the time. I don't even notice that I do it.

The article is a little GUI centric, but you can do this sort of thing in non-GUI apps too. How many of you emacs users idly press "C-x C-s" when you are sitting around thinking? I know I do it constantly. It feels good, and the only side effect is the reassuring message "(No changes need to be saved)"

Yup. I do the same though I only end up annoying myself, much like the above select-and-deselect-text posters when they're on nytimes.com, when I'm on the scratch buffer and I keep getting the "File to save in:" prompt.

I find it most interesting that many of these interactions are analogues to a petting motion. I don't think it's an accident that we find these petting motions reassuring either. I would guess that it might have something to do with nit-picking (think early ape-like ancestors), or possibly something to do with bonding with dogs (who use rubbing motions of these sort to determine pack order). Probably the former, since, while man's interaction with dog is very old, it's probably not old enough to have evolved a self-gratifying feedback loop.

I like gaming these free interactions. For instance, some computer track nubs have an autocorrect that stops the mouse pointer moving if it moves at a steady rate for long enough. The autocorrect puts an inverse velocity on the mouse pointer, so if you hold the nub steadily to the side for long enough and release, the mouse pointer moves on its own. I try to see how fast I can make it automatically move.

Also, when I'm bored, I like jiggling the compviz windows. That truly is a killer app.

Recently I installed a script on my website to track peoples' mouse movements. First thing I noticed was a user just clicking around in circles in empty space.

Seeing the headline, I thought 'one free interaction' was some sort of free-trial business-model analysis.

Clicking through and seeing the context was UI, I then thought 'one free interaction' was perhaps some sort of first-time-confirm of major or dangerous operations, or a way to walk people through key steps once before they're really used.

Turns out it's something else entirely... that's misnamed. I suggest instead 'playful interfaces' or 'fidget-friendly interaction'.

I think it's usually about being in control - Firefox 3 makes it even better because of the faded visual drag representation.

My pithy one line take on the article: try to keep interfaces and interactions fun, not just easy to use.

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