Hands off standard interface elements!

    Many developers suffer from an obsessive desire to improve everything. Insufficient insight is usually included with it in the kit to understand how, in fact, what is being improved worked before improvement.

    My appeal: hands off standard elements of the system interface! Stop trying to replace them with your improved options, stop trying to build them. Even if the improvement is successful, it will still cause inconvenience, because your program or site will be the only case where new user habits (and you quickly get used to good ones) work. And more often than not, improvement upon closer inspection will be detrimental.

    As an example, I want to bring the control I love - the scroll bar in Windows. She is beautiful as she is. It can be done better, but for this, first please be kind to figure out how it works now. I will not list all the intricacies of behavior (single click on an empty background under the bar, pressing and holding, calling up the menu, etc.), I will tell you about one thing:

    If you click on the slider and hold, the content starts to scroll,
    BUT
    If, continuing to hold the button mouse, move the cursor about 50-100 pixels from the slider, then it will return to the same place that it was before clicking, showing the previous place of the document.

    I constantly use this opportunity to look forward or backward in a long document, but then it’s easy to return exactly to the place where I was before (just moving the cursor and releasing the button).

    I hate any programs in which programmers have specifically worked to ensure that the scroll bar ceases to fulfill my favorite function.

    I take this opportunity to say hello to the guys doing OpenOffice. Thank you for looking forward or backward, I can’t get back in any way just by moving my mouse and releasing the scroll bar, I need to search again for the place where I left off.

    About why there is no kata, see the next series.

    Also popular now: