Don't Click It
dontclick.it
dontclick.it
On the other hand it looks cool.
I'm probably the only one who feels the same way about hidden tooltray icons, too, but I usually expose them all on Windows.
Sorry, but I think you have to go a few steps further if you really want to seamlessly eliminate the click (which begs the question: why?).
The UI was annoying - the same UI that I've run into for the new Sims game - an over-reliance on mouse-over events, popping menus in and out of existence based on minute, often accidental motion. You have no idea how hard it is to, say, buy a bed and choose the wood finish for your Sim, just because the UI sucks.
...which I consider annoying eye-candy. Eye candy that melt and drips uncontrollably for that matter. For me the reaction is more like the other who complained of motion sickness. For this user, please leave menu bars static (unless you're expanding content: like drop-down or slide-out menus). I'd rather have flashing, hopping ads in my peripheral vision (which I can tune out), that menus zipping around like eye-floaters.
[Sorry, maybe you caught me in a bad mood, but my mood tends to become bad when purposeless complexity (especially moving) intrudes.]
I mean really, it's just like using a normal UI while maniacally clicking as fast as possible. Every nav item you hover over gets selected. Every text field gets entered. Every button you move past gets pressed. It's like that Atari 2600 joystick with the "autofire" switch.
I went through their alternative button ideas. Two of them I "clicked" unintentionally. One of the I couldn't get to "click" at all.
All in all, they've successfully proved that this is a bad idea.
Edit: the subtle change in color or background that shows the potential for activation is an exception to hating mouse-over responses.
"DONTCLICK.IT is the final artwork of the author's diploma in Communication Design at the University Essen-Duisburg, Germany."
I was wondering who on earth would research user interfaces that diametrically oppose the instincts and conditioned behaviors of nearly all computer users. Now it suddenly makes sense.
This isn't to say it isn't cool or interesting, but it seems awful in usability terms.
Next I looked to see if I could find software that would let me use a key on my keyboard as a mouse click. I didn't find anything that seemed easy or free...
I realize that there are some hardwired behaviours on how I interact. 1) I keep hitting :q or ZZ in anything that looks like a texteditor, even in emacs. 2) I keep hitting ctrl-a on every line that have a cursor. 3) wsad and boomstick on 1 and rocketlaucher on 2
I don't think that I should be the reference for how a user should interact with a specific program or site. There are some areas where you could minimize the number of clicks like we have now days more or less removed the use of dialogues and wizardzzzzz.
Mouse and clicks are good but a thouchpad interface maybe should not pretend to be a mouse.
I know that HN is leaning more or less to web user interface but there are actually still a number of usage of interfaces to computer[programs] that don't is a browser or the toplevel GUI of your OS.
I guess there is some site where those making all these kinds of new games to DS,PS?,XBOX? discuss more or less the same kind of things but from a different angle.
My kinds don't look for wsad , the look for a stylus or the stick. The don't click instead they press X or blue button.
If I have a point at all, it must be that when your used to something it is a hard to relearn but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Take what you like and make it better.
Vimperator - http://vimperator.mozdev.org
Awesome - http://awesome.naquadah.org/
Xmonad - http://www.xmonad.org
We tried to eliminate a lot of clicking, and it completely backfired.
Why? Because people move the mouse to "explore". Just like in real world if you're in front of a vending machine or a menu, people like to "half point" at things to help them focus and get their bearings.
The idea of an interface without clicks is horrible. People feel trapped when they can't explore by moving the mouse around without consequence.
Also, people have been trained for 25 years to click on things. Heck most people can barely stand to single-click things! At this point my mom doesn't even realize you can single-click things and she effectively double-clicks everything.
Thus, if that demo is anything other than an experiment to make the points above it's a horrible idea.
The site is a neat experiment, but I can't help but feel that most users are conditioned enough from previous flash sites and non-flash rollover actions (drop downs, tool tips, etc) that they would find it easy not to click.
The animation was more than a little sluggish on this poor atom processor. It could have been more effective and less distracting had the animations been limited to rollover/click interactions. I guess that's the case with most flash sites. I'd like to see the site executed using html and javascript.
The problem I had with it was when I moved my mouse to read the text underneath the pointer, I would occasionally leave the target area and have it disappear out from under me.
while its not completely without its annoyances, considering the limitations it handles itself pretty well, and is certainly a worthwhile experiment.
It's demo-ware. Part of what I mean by that term are things that look good in the demo, but it turns out the demo is pushing the idea to the very limits. A demo of a good idea by necessity can only scratch the surface, not exhaust the idea. With demoware, it only works as long as you don't bring the idea into contact with the real world. It looks great as long as you stay in demoland, but that's it. See also: Purely visual general-purpose programming languages, 3D avatar-based chatting (not a game that also functions as a limited chat room, pure 3D chat).
see the iphone, a usual way of scrolling it to click somewhere around the scrollbar, that obviously sucks especially on a small touch screen, so they use clickless gestures.
while this experiment may not have directly influenced the iphone devs, it may have, and its in the same direction.
our interfaces are terrible at the moment, anything that pushes innovation into smarter ways of working with computers is good in my book.
I do agree that as a demo they pushed it to its limits, and that a lot of the cases its impractical, but there are positive lessons to be learnt that can be applied in real situations (like the iphone)
This is some fantastic new definition of "clickless" which I have been previously unaware of. You never remove your finger from the surface of your iPhone? I think you may be doing it wrong.
Modern mouse interfaces actually have more types of grunts (like the relatively recent scrollwheel innovation), and the iPhone multitouch is a way to get several types of grunts onto a touchscreen that previous had just tap and drag. Totally the opposite direction from this demo. If the iPhone developers carried anything away from this Flash demo, it was to head further away from this approach.
Interestingly, I was about to post a conclusion to this post based on how nobody has ever adopted this interface for anything, but I just realized that as of yesterday (in the US), I am wrong. Totally serious. The new DS game Knights in the Nightmare uses this interface for combat. It is adapted to the touchscreen by making a persistent cursor that simply stays still if you remove the stylus (which in general is a bad idea in the game), and if you then touch some other part of the screen, the cursor will head straight for it with a maximum speed (so no teleporting around the screen). Weapons are deployed with dragging, commands are triggered with hovering and some light gesturing, and so on. It's interesting, but it's also a decent demonstration of why you don't want to use this for serious work. It's one thing when you trigger the wrong unit in a game, it's quite another when you delete the wrong file.
Metacritic page for the game: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/knightsinthenig...
So, if you want to see who's right, you can now go try this interface out for a real product.
I dont believe the clickless interface is trying to make the user convey less information, but instead its trying to interpret information the user is already conveying in a smarter way, so they dont have to produce redundant information (the clicks).
Im sure I know of one or two good uses of this in practice, but its late and they arent coming to me right now.
This is a matter of information theory. It is an objective fact that only moving a mouse provides less information than a mouse that can also click. That is also why using this inferface is slower than using a conventional interface; you have to convey the same number of bits, but you have a smaller bandwidth to do it in. It is also, now that I think about it, a relatively decent explanation of why I consider this demoware; cutting down the bandwidth from human to computer certainly does have the effect of simplifying the interface, but only by slowing the user down and constraining the amount of information that can be extracted from the user. Throw this interface at a real problem with even more bits needing to be extracted from the user and the problems and slowdown will only compound. I don't think that most of us are looking to be slowed down.
In that entire paragraph, only that last sentence is opinion. The rest is a very simple application of information theory.
If you feel like you have to argue with that fact, I suggest brushing up on your information theory first. I'm not kidding about the objective fact bit. If you'd like to argue that interfaces should be based on reducing the amount of information extracted from the user, feel free, that is a conceivable argument, but it certainly flies in the face of experience and current interface developments.
(By the way, why am I being so harsh? It's education, albeit more for the audience than anybody else. Liking this interface as art is great, heck even I think it's sort of cool that way, but thinking it's actually a useful revolution is a sign that you are applying very weak thought processes to the idea, and it's helpful to see things like the simple application of information theory to the topic.)
urm, only the first sentence is an "objective fact", the rest is your opinion and fuzzy attempts at reasoning, if you are going to patronise, please be right.
while its true that the interface is sending less information, its entirely your opinion that there is not enough information already being sent by the user to determine what exactly they want to do.
thousands of people have installed mouse gesture plugins, the xbox natal project looks to be an entirely gesture driven, the idea that this type of interface is pie in the sky "art", as opposed to a useful experiment is well, wrong.
I usually wouldnt mind discussing this more but you have pretty much put me off any further conversation.
and please note I said "worthwhile experiment", not "revolutionary"
Gotta explore the unthinkable to come up with new things to think...