Magic Buttons

An antidotal UI story from a programmer that's worth paying attention to ...

"Today's The Daily WTF shows somebody's implementation of an onscreen pushbutton that does something different depending upon whether the user single-clicks it or double-clicks it. It reminds me of one of the more frustrating programming assignments I've had.

With a desire to leap-frog the competition, my employer had hired a user-interface designer (or human-factors expert or user-psychologist or something like that) to design our next-generation applications. This guy spent a few months observing users of our existing systems, and generated over a thousand pages of observations and theories about how the applications would best serve the users. After generating this monstrous stack of data, he designed a user interface that he felt would be very efficient and easy-to-use.

His design called for us to use the standard UI button widgets provided by the operating system (OS/2), but they would react as follows:

• single left click: Display a dialog box prompting the user for information about the "thing" associated with the button
• double left click: change the state of the "thing" associated with the button. The button would change color to indicate the new state. It would start gray, then turn yellow, then red, then green, then back to gray as the user double-clicked.
• single right click: Display a menu of states, so that the user could, for example, go right from gray to red, or green to yellow.
• double right click: Display a different menu, containing various commands.

We finished the application. The results were disappointing. The lesson is simple: a button should work like a button. If you want something that doesn't work like a button, don't use a button."   continued ...   (Via Undefined Value)

Magic Button.