1.2 Yahoo Buried My Arrows

from the cranky girlgeek dept./ theme: useability

Some brains, like mine, are especially sensitive to the perception of extra effort around small things such as pointing and clicking. In a hyperspeedy world, we even hate wasting nanos of time. When we sit at our screens creating things, the difference in one extra click, or one extra glance, is not insignificant.

So here's my latest beef in the ease of use department: Yahoo Mail  recently changed the menus in the toolbar of the online composing editor to make one pivotal move more cumbersome. It used to be the html editor had a 1-push button for indents; now it has a drop-down menu in which indent is stacked above outdent. (Follow the story jump to see more screen shots.)

This may sound less than trivial, but it's not if your eye-to-hand auto-routines work like mine.

Here's what I am talking about.

(a) 

(b)

...

...

What used to look like (a) and take half a glance to activate (push right or push left)  now looks like (b), in which it's easy to think you just have to point/click when you have to point/pull/pick and then click on the option of choice.

As a result of this one little feature-tweak what used to take two moves now takes four steps, in the mental sense. On top of which I have to really look, instead of just aim, to make sure I don't hit the top choice when I wanted the second option. Make whatever jokes you wish about old dogs and new tricks, but I am tres annoyed by how many redos this has already spawned in a week.

The total added time to execute may be less than 2 seconds, but it takes my aim away from the page and up to the toolbar to execute. This is all-around annoying for a command I use consantly. especially since it's not like they were short of real estate up there on that toolbar. It seems to have been one of those "because we could" decisions where some designer was thinking more about form than function.

This little thing makes a big difference if you happen to indent the contents of almost every note, which I tend to do. Call it a personal quirk, but I happen to think email text is more user-friendly if there's some white space between the window frame and the words. {Want to help me test this theory? Take the quick test on this companion page then come back here and comment with your results.)

So it's not as if I'm indifferent to form. Far from it. I just believe that form should be functional too. And 'functional' in my book means that any change in a GUI needs to make things simpler and faster, not just better looking.

 

So that is my cranklet for the day (said with a smiling nod to the real Cranky Geeks, Dvorak and Rupley), and thanks for reading it. If you happen to agree, please comment. If there's more than a couple of you who share my view, I'll send this post and your replies to the folks at Yahoo. fwiw.

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Related topics. For detail about how we aim and frame our attentions online and in life watch for our upcoming sister blog at focusandframes.com. (When it is launched, this link will be live.) 

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