Disruptive Features
Personal pet peeves that impede usability are mouse wheel cycling, tooltips, and mouseover popups. Those features are useful but become disruptive after a user learns an interface.
As always the design principle is easy — let users decide. Do not presume one way or another.
Places where mouse wheel cycling appears include:
- File manager tabs
- Terminal window tabs
- Text editor tabs
- Desktop mouse actions
- Panel taskbar buttons
- Workspace switcher/pager
Tooltips and mouseover popups are designed into many dialogs and also appear in file managers when the mouse pointer hovers over files
The solution is straightforward. Provide a configuration dialog check box for these features.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: General
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