Timeline for Should you concede to user demands that seem clearly inferior?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
46 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 9, 2017 at 17:45 | comment | added | user67695 | "The outside of a keyboard is bad for the inside of a mouse." | |
| Jul 21, 2017 at 12:08 | comment | added | Gallifreyan | I can't believe no one linked this before: How a Website Design Goes Straight to Hell on Oatmeal. | |
| Jun 6, 2014 at 3:34 | answer | added | Josh | timeline score: 0 | |
| Apr 30, 2014 at 10:21 | vote | accept | Bob Tway | ||
| Apr 30, 2014 at 10:21 | vote | accept | Bob Tway | ||
| Apr 30, 2014 at 10:21 | |||||
| Mar 30, 2014 at 4:59 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/#!/StackUX/status/450135178779037696 | ||
| Mar 29, 2014 at 22:14 | comment | added | jmiserez | While a nice quote, Henry Ford never actually said it: See this and this link. | |
| Mar 29, 2014 at 18:06 | comment | added | user42276 | this famous quote sums it all up better than all those very verbose answers: > If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” ― Henry Ford | |
| Mar 28, 2014 at 21:40 | answer | added | Vector | timeline score: 2 | |
| Mar 28, 2014 at 12:12 | comment | added | nmclean | @MattThrower It's not a question of keyboard vs. mouse supremacy. It's about choice. The problem is that you seem to have introduced a requirement that did not previously exist: scrolling. Consider the fact that a drop-down box can be controlled easily by clicks, arrow keys, scroll wheels, and typing letters. It's great because it doesn't impose a preference. For your new experience to be considered a real "upgrade", it should at least retain that quality. | |
| Mar 28, 2014 at 8:49 | comment | added | jwg | Your users have probably spent hundreds or thousands of times more time using this interface than you have. Maybe they know better than you how it should work. | |
| Mar 27, 2014 at 17:57 | comment | added | MikeS | A 75 item list certainly seems to be worthy of text filtering to me. I don't want to wade through a list of 75 things if I can just type the first few letters and narrow it down to just a couple things. | |
| Mar 27, 2014 at 17:10 | comment | added | Alec Teal | With GTK if you start typing while in a tree or list view you may filter. Good reason I think? Tab is also your friend, wxWidgets calls keyboard shortcuts "accelerators" for a reason :) | |
| Mar 27, 2014 at 10:26 | comment | added | NickG | Do all of your users even have a scroll wheel? We have several mice in the office which don't even have one (including both Macs). | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 17:40 | comment | added | Izkata | I'm with @ChrisH on this one: 75 items is too many to scroll through regularly. Around 15-20 is IMO where you'd want to start adding some sort of filter behavior. We use include Chosen's filtering behavior at 7-ish items, for example, because that's about as many that would be visible without scrolling. | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 16:43 | answer | added | arnthorsnaer | timeline score: 8 | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 16:40 | answer | added | Ken Forslund | timeline score: 9 | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 16:27 | answer | added | Keith Davies | timeline score: 4 | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 14:39 | comment | added | JAB |
@DA01 Another interesting alternative would be to have the tree view responsive to keyboard input, so pressing k would take you to the first item in the view starting with that letter and so on for each successive letter (plus the ability to browse the tree with arrow keys and such). I'm not sure which GUI frameworks support this and which don't, but I know that most native-Windows tree views have that sort of functionality.
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| Mar 26, 2014 at 9:06 | comment | added | Bob Tway | I feel compelled to point out to those of you evangelising keyboard use that the current users are not driving the app through the keyboard. They type into the text box and then switch to mouse. If they were power keyboard users, we'd have taken that into account from the off. | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 6:50 | comment | added | jpmc26 | "But the users hated it. ... they weren't used to using scroll wheels" Trying to tell the user how to behave flies in the face of the principle of user experience; your users may have information about their work that would change your mind. Also, touchpads don't have scroll wheels. They already filter via text box; can you expand that functionality? The filter could work against multiple levels of the tree, reducing or eliminating visual search. This would be familiar and save them effort. | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 6:33 | comment | added | Lieven Keersmaekers | It shouldn't be to hard to set up a test where you time the actions using the old and the new interface. Being a keyboard nut I'll admit I'm biassed but from your description it looks like the old way of doing things is faster. If it is, your users are right. I would hate to have a change forced upon me that would only slow me down without any clear benefits. | |
| Mar 26, 2014 at 0:31 | answer | added | Izhaki | timeline score: 18 | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 23:41 | answer | added | hookenz | timeline score: 0 | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 18:35 | comment | added | Steve Jessop | "Fear of change" is quite an opinionated and possibly unfair way to characterise, "doesn't like using scroll wheels". I like using scroll wheels but I don't like using the scroll zone at the right hand side of my laptop's touchpad. Presumably someone who does like using that thing thinks I fear change. I think they have unnaturally tiny fingers. So before considering whether to take into account "fear of change", consider whether to take into account "genuine differences of taste" :-) | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 18:16 | answer | added | user45517 | timeline score: 13 | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 17:34 | answer | added | Briguy37 | timeline score: 19 | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 16:33 | comment | added | avgvstvs | My 2c: If your Ux design didn't take into consideration what the users wanted out of their interface, the design wasn't superior. | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 16:31 | comment | added | avgvstvs | How I launch programs in Windows 7: Windows Key, type what I want, hit enter. How I launch programs in Ubuntu: Windows Key, Type what I want, hit enter. I prefer text-based systems that let me jump to where I want to go... I don't like being "guided" don't like using scrollbars/scrollwheels. I like simple, immediate efficiency. | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 16:11 | answer | added | Dan | timeline score: 2 | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 14:45 | comment | added | Chris H | Do I get this right that you're expecting them to scroll through a 75 item dropdown? I've been using scrollwheels since you could first buy them, and that's an awfully tedious way to access something. Is the list in alphabetical order so at least it could jump to the right point when they start typing? Is the next/previous step typing or mouse or undefined? What happens when the user resizes the window tiny so they can retype stuff because they'd rather be pasting? | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 13:37 | comment | added | ebyrob | In my opinion, if a user must touch the mouse to navigate your interface then your interface is broken. Even Microsoft used to realize this, and they pioneered much of the idea in the late 90's. Not everyone has a track-point to keep them near home position, and even if they did, clicking 5 levels of tree-view is obnoxious at best. "/page1<enter>widget5<enter>weight<enter>" <- no mouse required. (bonus points if they can go back up with keyboard only, say ctrl-up-arrow or shift-tab?) | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 9:12 | comment | added | Bob Tway | @Comintern It's certainly better if - and it's a big if - people are used to using the scroll wheel. That's the crux of this particular instance: should we force the user to learn a better way, or accommodate the marginally slower method they're used to. | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 9:09 | vote | accept | Bob Tway | ||
| Apr 30, 2014 at 10:21 | |||||
| Mar 25, 2014 at 2:55 | comment | added | Comintern | Not a direct answer, but you should examine your premise that the interface is "better". I've been on the other side of this situation many times, and have typically found that interfaces that ignore the typical use case are among the most obnoxious. This actually reminds me of a design change where a series of combo-boxes was replaced with a tree, and it ended up taking 10 times as long to navigate because you could no longer cut and paste or just type the first 2 or 3 letters and tab anymore. You had to expand 5 nodes instead. Elegant and simple, yes. Efficient and usable, no. | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 2:09 | answer | added | user45473 | timeline score: 14 | |
| Mar 25, 2014 at 0:03 | comment | added | Michael Hampton | Is it not possible to provide both interfaces, and let users slowly become accustomed to the new way? | |
| Mar 24, 2014 at 22:06 | comment | added | Brian S | @thunderblaster, The customer is not always right, but the customer is always the one with the money. You may have to decide whether you'd rather be right or paid. ;) Admittedly, "user" is not necessarily always equal to "customer." | |
| Mar 24, 2014 at 21:11 | answer | added | Joshua Barron | timeline score: 73 | |
| Mar 24, 2014 at 20:45 | answer | added | Jason A. | timeline score: 53 | |
| Mar 24, 2014 at 18:59 | review | Close votes | |||
| Mar 25, 2014 at 8:07 | |||||
| Mar 24, 2014 at 17:46 | comment | added | thunderblaster | I feel this xkcd comic is relevant. The user is not always right. | |
| Mar 24, 2014 at 17:43 | answer | added | Sheff | timeline score: 8 | |
| Mar 24, 2014 at 16:58 | review | First posts | |||
| Mar 24, 2014 at 17:11 | |||||
| Mar 24, 2014 at 16:54 | comment | added | DA01 | I know this doesn't directly answer your question, but what if the full tree view was also filtered via a text box? As for what was the right action here, I think that could/should have been perhaps easier to figure out via some user testing outside of your existing group. Still not a perfect set of data, but might have shed some light on which was easier to use out-of-the-box. | |
| Mar 24, 2014 at 16:39 | history | asked | Bob Tway | CC BY-SA 3.0 |