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Something about interface development seems to be going wrong lately because in the last two weeks I’ve had two really crappy experiences with web browsers that could have been avoided. Or which I could have avoided had I not used the crappy interface at all.

The first pain in the ass that I ran into was the Internet Explorer 7 zooming feature. Yes I was aware of this feature but just happened to be on a strange computer at the university and yes Internet Explorer 7 isn’t much chop. So I went to scale some text using behaviour I’ve used for some time without any bother and the next thing I’m confronted with an obtrusive zooming feature. Why is zoom the default and why is it up to me to select zoom text as an option? Isn’t the current convention to zoom text? Isn’t there any concept of meeting the users expectation? Anyway, yes its a feature that may help some people but it made for a crap experience on my part.

Why was the IE7 Zoom feature a pain in the ass? Really? The reason is that I was in a pressure situation and had to deal with this unannounced behaviour. Don’t mix that concept up with a user choosing to work something out at their convenience because it was very inconvenient. I would have had to immediately search for the text zooming option but I ditched for Firefox (where I should have been in the first place).

Second crap experience happened to be in Opera (which surprised me). If you’re a seasoned reader of this site you may recall I’m trying to wean off Internet Explorer. What happened was that I had my two monitors open - one monitor was displaying pages of a clients large corporate website and on the other monitor I was using a graphics program. Unfortunately keyboard shortcuts kept activating themselves in Opera doing things like turning images off and turning styles off or something. Anyway this was during a very pressure ridden stage of my work process where I really didn’t need this behaviour. I had to revert to another browser to see the graphics necessary for my work to proceed. Time is money and thinking is time!

Why was this behaviour from Opera bad? Yep I’m aware a lot of people would say as a computer professional I need to know every shortcut key in every browser and operating system known to man. I disagree. I’m still a user and, if anything, as a technical user I wouldn’t expect that the barrier for me would be as high as most other users. So I can tell you this behaviour was a significant barrier which required me to change browsers mid-workflow.

My concern is about the trend to create every function under the sun and push it obtrusively at the user. Why? My problem in Opera highlights the keyboard shortcut (aka accesskey) problem that every different program uses different keys. So I didn’t choose to turn off images at all… like it says at the beginning of Trainspotting I chose something else.

My concern is that interface designers in many instances aren’t thinking about the user-expected behaviours involved with using the interface. That its about the feature not the choice to use features that drove those issues. Let me put it this way: what would be the harm in having a menu option which meant that keyboard shortcuts were opted into? Rather than on by default for misadventurous workers with better things to do than search Google for shortcuts. And how about Internet Explorer 7 just having default text zoom and allowing users to opt into full page zoom (after all their zoom isn’t that great either)?

Maybe I picked two obvious targets for this post but both these impacted significantly on my workflow over the last week or two and I thought it was worth mentioning.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 4:07 pm and is filed under usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.