unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jan-Christoph Borchardt <inquata@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 14 May 2010 02:18, Sohail Mirza <mirzmaster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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!

That is exactly why interaction needs to be intuitive and not require learning.


> 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.

The problem is only present if you want to do something other with a
file / folder than open it (copying, moving, renaming, removing).
Double-click would not break anything, programs are not launched
twice.

What about that: Users like it and are fed up with the Windows
double-clicking? Maybe users don’t even know they can switch to
single-click, because no one ever told them. Maybe we could point out
that it is changeable in Windows as well (or is it?).


> 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.

We really have to do testing on how much opening and how much other
file interaction users are doing. Everyone bringing up their anecdotes
and conceptions will not help anyone. If anything, bring up real life
examples, complete user stories.


> 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.

That was in 1998. No one was using touchscreens, computers were
primarily used for work and not for fun and usability wasn’t evolved
as much as it is today.


A valid point I got from a Mac user: Selecting the file to use quick
look is more often used than actually opening the file (because it is
quicker …). That would be a problem if we actually had quick look or
another kind of preview. ;)