Raymond Chen is one of my favourite technical bloggers. On his site, "The Old New Thing", he takes a whimsical look at Windows internals past and present, often from his perspective as a long-serving Microsoft employee.
Some years ago he posted a series of articles on scrollbars - a seemingly innocuous UI element with hidden depth. The behavioural intricacies that users have come to expect when scrolling - from distances and delays to hit areas and dragging operations - are difficult to emulate if creating a control from scratch. And without the details, he notes, your program will just feel 'odd' in a strange way that you often can't pinpoint.
While an enjoyable read, I began to fully understand this a couple of days ago as I set about creating a Facebook-style tag editor for the new design of Neowin. Various plugins exist including the excellent FCBKcomplete but I wanted to give it a shot myself.
The initial prototype was completed relatively quickly in HTML, CSS and jQuery, but it didn't feel smooth, if that's the right word. Turns out it was the myriad of enhancements - small in development effort but numerous - that mattered:
- Providing visual feedback when refusing duplicate tags
- Cancelling the input of a tag with the Escape key
- Deleting a previous tag with the Backspace key
- Allowing the Tab, Enter or Comma keys to commit a tag
- Various focus fixes for keeping text entry of multiple tags speedy
- Providing visual help on adding a tag when focus is elsewhere
I'm sure I've missed some, but it seems the small details really do matter in the pursuit of maximum usability. Users shouldn't have to work out how to use your web application; it should use familiar, tried and tested paradigms to which they can relate without thinking. And I suppose developing consciously with that in mind can only come with experience.
