Scatterism

Absolutely no hidden actions! It’s a stupid idea to make double-clicking a page comes up with a huge text box with some content. I, and probably a lot of other people too, have this nasty habit of double-clicking words to highlight them, this helps me focus on what I’m reading, it can also help me copy a single word, a date or a location. When I double-click a word in a page I expect it to be highlighted, just that double-clicked word, don’t change the behavior I’m used to, you’re not making it any easier for me.

I know that I shouldn’t be quoting myself, but this post reminded me of my perfect wiki post, and I had to reiterate one of the issues I’m very concerned about.

Oh yeah. This post was supposed to be about double-clickable wiki pages, but what the hell.

You see, most people read web pages by scanning them, and there are two types of scanners; those who double-click, and those who don’t. I think Rands will know what I’m talking about. Some people’s brains scan for certain words, nothing specific really, but words that give the gist of a paragraph.

I’m half sure that if you’re one of us, your eyes probably read “overflow”, “hidden actions”, “double-clicking”, “perfect wiki”, etc. Just a few keywords. You probably even clicked a few words ahead of the line you’re currently reading so you can mark your progress.

Double-clickers constantly feel the pressure of time, like we can never catch up, so we scan, and that blue block-selection is our way of telling ourselves that we’re almost done with the current page and going to move to a new one soon.

We apply the same technique on feed readers and email clients. We don’t read the titles, we simply scroll down and look for catchy words. Most of us have developed skills to filter the three most important lists:

• Recent news titles, where our eyes keep looking for interesting stuff. We automatically assume everything is garbage unless our brains say otherwise.

• New email messages, where our eyes keep looking for spam. When combined with a spam filter, most of the received email is assumed to be clean, so a quick scan on that huge list can tell us which emails to delete and which to keep. The idea is to be done with the cleaning up process before assigning time to reading emails.

• Google search results are the trickiest. Because the results are mixed in quality, people develop skills to categorize them.

  I’ve seen this mostly with developers and sysadmins: They type in a phrase and start scrolling, middle-clicking potential answers, completely discarding mailing list results (unless they contain at least a whole meaningful sentence), passing by installation HOWTOs and news sites, and ending up with a few open tabs that are mostly likely to solve their problems.