Opera's Unwanted Functionality

I was just doing a bit of work in the Opera web browser, typing some information into a web app's text box, when I accidentally de-selected the input box in the process of jumping between applications. On my next keystroke the interface suddenly went to an archaic layout. It looked like something rendered in Netscape 3.

I had no idea how I did this, it was completely unwanted, and the impact was extremely disruptive. Closing and restarting the application didn't remove this sticky setting, and randomly (and systematically) selecting what I thought would be the accidental shortcut keys yielded no solution.

Now I had to waste time finding, and then turning off, a feature that I didn't want in the first place.

This brings to mind a couple of user interface issues:

• All applications should have an undo stack (a transaction log, of sorts) that clearly logs and lists every notable app change - minimizing, maximizing, resizing, or changing options like rendering mode. If there was such an undo stack, I could jump to it, see the "Switch to User Stylesheet Rendering" transaction just occurred moments ago - maybe even with a help link to see what that event type was and how I triggered it - and I could roll it back. This is something I've wanted for years (neigh...decades) but of course have never had the time or resources to implement such a non-standard technique in my own apps.
• Having options like this - switching rendering modes - configured for a standard key (in this case Shift-G) is questionable, and given the severity of the change it should really ask for a confirmation of use. "You have selected the shortcut to switch to User stylesheet mode (Shift-G). Are you sure?" (with a checkbox allowing brave users to avoid the confirmation in the future). It's a bit of education and avoidance wrapped up in one.
• Opera doesn't indicate the shortcuts on many of their menu items, including the style mode menu item (the culprits in this case), making it difficult to investigate possible causes.

While there is a minority of users who override site stylesheets with their own, justifying the feature in Opera (though I'm not convinced that it should be an everyday keystroke like Shift-G by default), this brings me to another user interface observation.

Highly Configurable Interfaces are Usually Detrimental

Drawing from personal experience, I worked on a project quite a few years back where one developer insisted upon absolute flexibility in the user interface - Every toolbar had to be movable and dockable anywhere, every sidebar item drag and droppable, every menu item configurable, every UI skinnable. It was a nice cop out for us because we didn't really have to put too much thought into the interface, and could always justify it with the stock "the user can configure it how they want". Stick some more toolbars, statusbars, and panels in there because the user can clean it up according to their own needs, the logic went.

In the field, about 99.9% (more likely 100%) of the time that people discovered this functionality it was to their detriment. Like the taskbar-stuck-perilously-on-the-side-of-the-screen on your Aunt's Windows 95 computer, it was just something that happened by accident, and they didn't know how to get it back the way it was: No one (or very few) did it on purpose, but there it was terrorizing every computer user.

The first step of any support call for our app was to determine in what innovative ways the user managed to mess up their user interface. After getting a visualization of the sidebar on the bottom, the icons all on the background, the toolbar on the right, some critical toolbars hidden, with the menus all jumbled and the icons all removed, the cleanup began.

On the next release a menu item to reset the interface to the initial defaults was added, and on further releases most interface flexibility was removed (or alternately made much more difficult to do - you had to be dedicated and informed if you really wanted to change things. Someone is much more likely to unintentionally hit Shift-G with no input box focused than they are to accidentally go into the advanced preferences and set an option).

The moral of the story is that customizable interfaces are seldom beneficial, and instead function as a lazy, non-committal cop-out by the developers and designers of the application.

Even the most fundamental element of our user experience - windowing - merits some analysis: Apart from Winamp and Media Player, how often are apps in any configuration other than maximized or minimized? I run with dual-monitors, and 99% of the time one or both of them has a full screen application on them. My "windowing" is alt-tabbing through full-screen windows, and I copy data between apps using copy/paste, or, where dragging is necessary, via the taskbar.

Tagged: [Software Development], [Programming], [Software-Development], [Usability]