unity-design team mailing list archive

[Sohail Mirza <mirzmaster@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 5:37 PM, Luke Morton
<luke.morton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Nothing's lost, but learnt behaviours would have to change.
>


Changing learnt behaviours is easier said than done!

A cost of this change is the frustration of users who are accustomed to
Windows' default behaviour at their workplace, or at home.  This is
potentially a level of frustration equal to (or greater than) that of users
fed up with double-clicking.  It's very easy to understate this cost, as you
have done.

If indeed the cost of having users relearn file interaction is greater than
the benefit of single-clicking, then it is not the right thing to do.

I would also like to point out that single-clicking was attempted by default
in Windows 98 SE (or was it ME?).  You'll note that Microsoft abandoned that
default setting very quickly (presumably because of the cost of having users
relearn the behaviour involved in file manipulation).  Anecdotally, that
"feature" annoyed just about everyone I know, including myself, and to no
small degree.  Having nothing happen when you single click a file is, imho,
far less annoying than having an application launch when you simply meant to
select the file.

-- 
sfm