You need to get external users to test it. I highlight as I read, and from what you describe it probably needs an edit/read only flag.
Davy Hexed into a portable ouija board. -----Original Message----- From: Joseph Clark <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:13:38 To: ozDotNet<[email protected]> Reply-To: ozDotNet <[email protected]> Subject: Users who compulsively highlight or click text as they read it - are you out there? Hi list! This is a bit of an odd request, but I'm yet to find the right incantation of search phrases that will yield results from the Internet - hopefully you can help! There is a certain subset of computer users who, when reading text on the screen, compulsively click or highlight text that they are reading on the screen (I am one of them!). I didn't even know I was doing it until someone pointed it out to me whilst I was pairing with them a few years ago. One of our in-house products recently shipped a new milestone version internally with a new "feature" when viewing issues that allows you to instantly edit the content of the fields on the screen simply by simply clicking on them (turning the plain HTML into editable form controls on-the-fly). This is pretty neat, but as a serial text-clicker, this feature is downright infuriating. I was happy to put this down as either a little personality quirk of my own, or merely some indication that I may be insane, but a quick straw poll of those nearby finds at least 3 other people who have the same behaviour, or some variant (one guy says he clicks on browser windows a lot as a muscle-memory thing to ensure the right browser window has focus). I'm trying to describe to the other team why this new feature sucks for some people, but I have no idea if that "some people" is one in ten users, or one in one million. Have searched a bit online for information about this, but I don't really know what to search for. Does this user behaviour have a name? Are there other people like me out there (hello? hello?)? Any literature around on whether or not its a great idea to bind functionality to an innocuous user-action like text-selection or clicking in an apparently non-clickable area? Cheers! Joe.
