Don't click it - Website navigation without mouse click

http://www.dontclick.it/

by Garbage • 16 years ago

20 28 16 years ago

Slow. Oh so slow. I hate having to wait for the bloody animation to finish unwrapping itself before deciding to show me something that wasn't quite what I wanted, and then having to wait again to find a different hot spot to hover over and see what it deigns to tell me.

It might be a clever implementation, but understand this: I browse by opening up to 30 or 40 tabs, then skimming through the first ones while the later ones load. I can touch and flick through literally 60 to 80 pages per minute. (edited: I said hundreds, but that was an exaggeration. However 60 to 80 is conservative when I'm in fast search mode)

You want to slow me down? Don't expect me to visit again. OK, I'm not normal, and I'm not average, but I'm incredibly frustrated by this interface.

Dilpil• 16 years ago

Your not the only that does that, I think most people who tinker with computers professionally do that.

Its kind of funny: computer programmers browse the internet the way an operating system does IO.

yuvadam• 16 years ago

The concept of click-less browsing is interesting and might have some potential.

This specific implementation is closed (Flash-based), heavy on my bandwidth, slow and generally not too appealing.

cryptoz• 16 years ago

> The concept of click-less browsing is interesting and might have some potential.

I sure hope not. Anyone who builds click-less based sites had better be prepared to lose all mobile users, or develop two entirely separate front-ends.

Clicks are important. They're not going anywhere.

hnal9432• 16 years ago

I think tablets are the reason clicks no longer make as much sense as they used to. Clicks are built into our mental model because of a lifetime of using the mouse.

twymer• 16 years ago

This was posted a long time ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=644218

tonycore• 16 years ago

I love how the premise is to not click- but to get started you have to... click.

mildweed• 16 years ago

Clickless browsing is just another way to say "mouse gestures". Yes, future interface devices may not have a 'click' function and may be gesture-based, but as for my mouse as it stands today, a click is extremely helpful.

fezzl• 16 years ago

The only problem is that it is in Flash.

prs• 16 years ago

Once you are in their site and play around with the navigation, do not click. Seriously.

Their 'Hey, I told you not to click but you did anyway' screen is not only annoying and headache-inducing. In my opinion, it could also be dangerous.

Reminding oneself of http://www.w3.org/TR/UNDERSTANDING-WCAG20/seizure.html from time to time is a good idea.

webuiarchitect• 16 years ago

Isn't that very (very) old? I remember seeing it long back

grantbachman• 16 years ago

Yeah, it's at least 4 years old, I remember this from high school.

jaysonelliot• 16 years ago

Exactly the opposite of what I would want in a usable "humane interface."

I have spent a lot of time as a UX architect trying to reduce the chaotic mess of mouseover frenzy, and here comes a site that is all mouseover frenzy.

Gestures are even worse - they take what would have been an intuitive behavior -- clicking, typing a command, pressing a clearly labeled button -- and replace it with hand waving that you have to memorize in special patterns as if you were waving a magic wand.

It's a clever design, I'm glad he did it - I would just never want to navigate an entire site that acted like that.

marknutter• 16 years ago

I find it incredibly ironic that I had to click the flash to get the site to load.

SpoonMeiser• 16 years ago

Can't wait to try this out on my touch-screen phone or tablet PC...

...oh, wait.

simonsarris• 16 years ago

This was an absolutely dreadful and arresting experience for me. What was going on in my head:

Okay, so I'm looking at this thing, and moving the mouse moves this mouse on the page... WOAH.

What? The page changed? I wasn't even done reading the last page. I don't even know what page I used to be on. The back button does not seem to work.

Things were moving underneath the text I was trying to read while confusion was being generated far faster than any enlightening design. Page changes were also very upsetting, I don't want to be nauseated as I try to explore a website.

And I certainly want a way to go back to where I was if I accidentally move the mouse. A click is a commit to do something. Apparently on these pages I can commit to doing something by merely moving the mouse, and there's no way to go back if I do something I didn't mean to commit to! Whats worse, I had to move the mouse to see things more clearly, because the page as-presented was not as clear as it might have been.

jordan0day• 16 years ago

Yeah, the whole time I was being annoyed with stuff changing even though I didn't ask it to (by clicking, of course!), I was telling myself "They're trying to show me how clicking has ruined my brain! They're going to show me how this is better!"

I never learned how it was better.

I only lasted on that site for about 45 seconds. I saw some "aren't these mouse gestures better than clicking?!?!" examples, but to me they just seemed like roundabout ways of... clicking. Obviously mouse gestures can be more powerful, since a click is basically "execute the action represented by the glyphs underneath my mouse pointer" while a gesture can be "do any number of actions irrespective of where my mouse pointer currently is", but this site didn't seem to take advantage of that.

flogic• 16 years ago

I guess it's useful if you're disabled. Otherwise this is a completely silly idea. We've mastered right clicking, left clicking, and double clicking. Why drop that channel of information? The last thing we need to is a novel way of decreasing the amount of bandwidth from the user to the computer. It's already the most restricted path.

ehutch792• 16 years ago

how is this good for the disabled? if you're unable to click, i'd have to assume you have difficulty moving a mouse with pinpoint accuracy. hell i had problems doing that and i'm fully functional here.

if anything this would be HELL for anyone lacking full motor skills

retube• 16 years ago

I don't understand. This is just actioning on mouse over. I was imagining that there was going to be some revolutuionary new site design/structure to accomdate this, but no. It's just a normal (albeit flash) website with mouseovers. And it's fu*king annoying. Stuff keeps popping up when you don't want it to. There's a reason links are clicked, not wafted over.

torme• 16 years ago

While I agree, with the general consensus here, that the design itself is pretty useless in practice, I think that some of what they've done is kind of intriguing, from a mouse intent perspective.

When I saw the label of a "clickless" interface, I immediately thought I would constantly be dodging popped in elements trying to get at other elements, but this actually happened far less often than I anticipated, mostly because it was designed fairly well for that use case.

I think in general, mouse intent elements, such as pop up menus on hover, are hugely frustrating on 99% of sites. Just now I was trying to close an ad on the bottom of a youtube video, but the resolution pop up kept jumping in the way. Navigation menus are frequently the same way, they pop over other content without you intending it to do so, and then its frustrating getting them out of the way.

Personally, I dont see the benefit of trying to guess what the user is trying to do by where theyre hovering, but a lot of sites do this anyway, and with some disregard to the side effects.

At the very least, this site offers some interesting paradigms for a clickless UI, and illustrates a somewhat thoughtful design around that interaction.

Dysiode• 16 years ago

I'm actually surprised people so vehemently dislikes this. While a click-less interface may not be inherently superior to one with clicks it's still an interesting concept to explore, which is exactly what Dontclick.it does.

I personally found the site to be intuitive; although, Areas, a click-less shooter (http://www.kongregate.com/games/Ridiculous/areas), did a fine job of teaching me to inhibit my urge to click everything.

codeglomeration• 16 years ago

Oh yeah. Cause if you're already using the mouse to navigate it's so fricking hard to click. And the whole graphics with the mouse and hand, just hides away all the content, so I have to go to extremes to be able to reveal the content. And I mouse over something else by mistake and the whole content changes.

This is not an improvement. This is horrible usability.

I thought this was supposed to be a UI design that doesn't require the use of the mouse.

Don't click it - Website navigation without mouse click

Related Stories