2010-03-25
GMail, Fitt’s Law, Engineers
text 18:25:05
Coding Horror: The Opposite of Fitts’ Law
Every few days I accidentally click Report Spam when I really meant to click Archive. Now, to Google’s credit, they do offer a simple, obvious undo path for these accidental clicks. But I can’t help wondering why it is, exactly, that these two buttons with such radically different functionality just have to be right next to each other.I think it’s worth mentioning that the keyboard shortcuts for “archive” and “Report spam” are extremely different from each other. In fact, the destructive ones (report spam, delete) require me to be holding shift down at the time to use them. So that’s nice. (insert US-centric keyboard shortcut rant here, of course.)
Google are the engineer’s engineers; it’s hardly surprising they seem to think more about keyboard shortcuts than visual UI elements.
