I just ran into another example of programmed behavior. In building the sign-in form for our web site, we have one of those "I agree to the terms of service" links, with "terms of service" being a link to the actual terms.
I put the checkbox on the right side of the link. My reasoning was if you're tabbing through the form, filling it in, you'll "land on" the TOS link first, can hit enter to pop it up (and perhaps even read it), then tab to the checkbox to check it. Several folks told me they had never seen the TOS checkbox on the right on any other web site. I could have argued that "many other web sites are inefficient", but my slight efficiency improvement wasn't really worth the effort of digging my feet in and fighting about it. I've been in that position many times before, and in the end, if it's just simpler to do what people expect, even if it's slightly less efficient, I'm happy to give up the ghost. On the other hand, I was working on a theory and not established user preference, so I tend to go where feedback takes me in those cases, as you mention below. Bryan http://www.bryanminihan.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Pankaj Chawla Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] [Design Patterns] Save and Cancel Just to give an example of how programmed people are; in a new product we were doing we decide to move File->Import menu item to Project->Import as our application had a notion of Project and Import seemed like a functiomality that belonged to the Project. The outcome was that we heard people complaining lost functionality as they couldnt fine File->Import and nobody even looked under Project menu to see if it was there. When we tried to explain to customers, the response was "File->Import is programmed into us and we just want it there, it might not be the right place but if we can find it there it is the right place for us". And this was not a one customer response but almost everybody had the same one. So the moral of the story is - "dont change things that people have got programmed into even if they dont make sense to our designer's brain :-)" Cheers Pankaj ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
