Don't Click It

http://www.dontclick.it

by jmonegro • 17 years ago

56 40 17 years ago

Made me motion sick, but I am prone to such things. I hate actions on mouse over. Mousing over is the byproduct of what I actually want to do, which is select things. Having an ever-present, single, cursor is a huge limitation of interfaces. Using mouse-over as the primary interface modality reinforces this limitation.

Edit: the subtle change in color or background that shows the potential for activation is an exception to hating mouse-over responses.

Kejistan• 17 years ago

Interesting site, but I really cannot understand why the mouse click is a "bad" thing. Having pages do nothing unless you explicitly click is a great thing, that site showed me exactly how annoying it can be to control an interface that wants to rearrange itself all the time based on mouse movements. Moving the mouse to a link and having the link move AWAY because you happened to move across one of the links between it and your mouse is simply annoying.

Retric• 17 years ago

Exactly, when scrolling though a list the first item stays on the top and the next item on the bottom. This is a horrible interface. They could "improve" it by having a navigation area, and a viewable area as separate things, but then you need to exit the navigation area to get to the next stage. But, then you need a complex mouse movement to exit the navigation area and get to where you want to be. The true value of a click is the clear delineation that this is what I want.

On the other hand it looks cool.

CalmQuiet• 17 years ago

They're not suggesting click is bad. It's the equivalent of link-bait: An excuse to get you to try their mouse-over.

...which I consider annoying eye-candy. Eye candy that melt and drips uncontrollably for that matter. For me the reaction is more like the other who complained of motion sickness. For this user, please leave menu bars static (unless you're expanding content: like drop-down or slide-out menus). I'd rather have flashing, hopping ads in my peripheral vision (which I can tune out), that menus zipping around like eye-floaters.

[Sorry, maybe you caught me in a bad mood, but my mood tends to become bad when purposeless complexity (especially moving) intrudes.]

potatolicious• 17 years ago

IMHO there is nothing here intrinsically better about the experience - what they seem to have done is simply take a good old Flash interface and ripped out the click and replaced it with mouseover events.

Sorry, but I think you have to go a few steps further if you really want to seamlessly eliminate the click (which begs the question: why?).

The UI was annoying - the same UI that I've run into for the new Sims game - an over-reliance on mouse-over events, popping menus in and out of existence based on minute, often accidental motion. You have no idea how hard it is to, say, buy a bed and choose the wood finish for your Sim, just because the UI sucks.

cduan• 17 years ago

Interface tries to intelligently rearrange itself, and ends up annoying user? Reminds me of that old MS Office "feature" of hiding unused menu items, which bugged me like crazy.

thorax• 17 years ago

Yeah, it really makes me feel paranoid that the item I want will be hidden when the menu is shown, so I always expanded it (until I turned it off entirely).

I'm probably the only one who feels the same way about hidden tooltray icons, too, but I usually expose them all on Windows.

zkz• 17 years ago

There is a case when clicking is bad: in some mouseless interfaces like those based on computer vision. I once worked on one of those and had the user freely move his hand over the space to explore some icons (while having a VR headset covering his head). This interface would have been ideal for such kind of project, really.

daleharvey5• 17 years ago

quite old but its a really good experiment, while clicking seems fine for now, its a nightmare a lot of the time on touch screen interfaces, even clicking with my trackpad is annoying.

while its not completely without its annoyances, considering the limitations it handles itself pretty well, and is certainly a worthwhile experiment.

jerf4• 17 years ago

It was a very good experiment; it proved to me it's a bad idea and could never work. No sarcasm. Negative results are results.

It's demo-ware. Part of what I mean by that term are things that look good in the demo, but it turns out the demo is pushing the idea to the very limits. A demo of a good idea by necessity can only scratch the surface, not exhaust the idea. With demoware, it only works as long as you don't bring the idea into contact with the real world. It looks great as long as you stay in demoland, but that's it. See also: Purely visual general-purpose programming languages, 3D avatar-based chatting (not a game that also functions as a limited chat room, pure 3D chat).

daleharvey5• 17 years ago

it didnt prove that to me at all.

see the iphone, a usual way of scrolling it to click somewhere around the scrollbar, that obviously sucks especially on a small touch screen, so they use clickless gestures.

while this experiment may not have directly influenced the iphone devs, it may have, and its in the same direction.

our interfaces are terrible at the moment, anything that pushes innovation into smarter ways of working with computers is good in my book.

I do agree that as a demo they pushed it to its limits, and that a lot of the cases its impractical, but there are positive lessons to be learnt that can be applied in real situations (like the iphone)

philwelch• 17 years ago

Since the "don't click" style of interface is diametrically opposed to the very idea of selecting text to copy and paste (well, unless they rework it to use key commands from text editors) I have to screenshot and transcribe this from the site:

"DONTCLICK.IT is the final artwork of the author's diploma in Communication Design at the University Essen-Duisburg, Germany."

I was wondering who on earth would research user interfaces that diametrically oppose the instincts and conditioned behaviors of nearly all computer users. Now it suddenly makes sense.

This isn't to say it isn't cool or interesting, but it seems awful in usability terms.

dan_the_welder• 17 years ago

Well, I hate flash and those popup link things because they break my learned work flow. I use the mouse to keep track of where I am in the text, to highlight, pop links into new windows, do Google searches and most importantly as an outlet for my ADD/OCD. So when the interface starts doing random stuff I get forcibly removed from my concentration. I am not against this kind of thing, but it belongs in certain specific places with lots of warnings before it happens and an opt-out if you expect me to use your site.

jf• 17 years ago

Last time I saw this I was in a lot of pain from RSI, it hurt to click on things. I spent a long time looking to see if somebody had found a way to replace the Mac OS X buttons with "no click" buttons like they have on that site.

Next I looked to see if I could find software that would let me use a key on my keyboard as a mouse click. I didn't find anything that seemed easy or free...

dylanz• 17 years ago

One day I hope I'll be able to "natively" browse the internet, graphics, videos and all... in a terminal window, or, something fully compatible with Vim/Emacs bindings.

dylanmcd• 17 years ago

Like vimperator? I use it, and I love it. In fact, I'm thinking about moving to a windows manager such as awesome or Xmonad for a completely mouseless experience.

Vimperator - http://vimperator.mozdev.org

Awesome - http://awesome.naquadah.org/

Xmonad - http://www.xmonad.org

anthonyb• 17 years ago

There's also Ratpoison - http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/

yagiz• 17 years ago

There's Conkeror (http://conkeror.org) which is like a minimal Firefox with Emacs bindings.

zackattack• 17 years ago

I can't wait until I can navigate the internet using ERPs!

access_denied• 17 years ago

It made me calm, like medidation (or medication?). I guess I like it. I can imagine to have something like that for an ebook-reader style app.

nopassrecover• 17 years ago

Neat idea - I kind of like the mouseover awesomeness of Windows 7 which this in concept reminds me of. But I couldn't do without clicking - it's a tactile confirmation.

GrandMasterBirt• 17 years ago

its fucking horrible... Just mouse-overs and shit moving my mouse is no longer possible to just keep track of where im reading, instead i can't stop shit from radically changing on me. Most of the time shit was just popping out without a click or anything. Very annoying I could not use it for more than 1 minute.

cLive• 17 years ago

Very pretentious. Too much movement.

akkartik• 17 years ago

Can someone please correct the title so I don't have to stare at crappy english at the top of my HN page?

mitko• 17 years ago

I like the idea to reduce clicking, but eliminating it seems to create more confusion than easiness. On the other side, maybe it will be cool to have a mouse which doesn't need force to click- maybe that would reduce RSI (I am not specialist and cannot say for sure). For example what if the mouse had touchpad instead of buttons?

stuntgoat• 17 years ago

I was at the Maker Faire last Saturday and there was a company that had a true multi-touch screen that was very large ( something like 20" ). I can see how this would be useful when using a touch interface: I would not want to tap the screen. Great work!

dpifke• 17 years ago

This would work a lot better if the mouse pointer was hidden when not in motion.

The problem I had with it was when I moved my mouse to read the text underneath the pointer, I would occasionally leave the target area and have it disappear out from under me.

imd• 17 years ago

Something that I think is similar is dwell-clicking software (for disabled people, I think--just like the one-handle faucet).

jasonkester• 17 years ago

Perhaps they couldn't get the domain http://automaticallyclickeverythingfor.me ?

I mean really, it's just like using a normal UI while maniacally clicking as fast as possible. Every nav item you hover over gets selected. Every text field gets entered. Every button you move past gets pressed. It's like that Atari 2600 joystick with the "autofire" switch.

I went through their alternative button ideas. Two of them I "clicked" unintentionally. One of the I couldn't get to "click" at all.

All in all, they've successfully proved that this is a bad idea.

jonke• 17 years ago

I liked it first, using a eeepc and only thouchpad it was comfortable, then I tried some of the labs stuff and got disappointed.

I realize that there are some hardwired behaviours on how I interact. 1) I keep hitting :q or ZZ in anything that looks like a texteditor, even in emacs. 2) I keep hitting ctrl-a on every line that have a cursor. 3) wsad and boomstick on 1 and rocketlaucher on 2

I don't think that I should be the reference for how a user should interact with a specific program or site. There are some areas where you could minimize the number of clicks like we have now days more or less removed the use of dialogues and wizardzzzzz.

Mouse and clicks are good but a thouchpad interface maybe should not pretend to be a mouse.

I know that HN is leaning more or less to web user interface but there are actually still a number of usage of interfaces to computer[programs] that don't is a browser or the toplevel GUI of your OS.

I guess there is some site where those making all these kinds of new games to DS,PS?,XBOX? discuss more or less the same kind of things but from a different angle.

My kinds don't look for wsad , the look for a stylus or the stick. The don't click instead they press X or blue button.

If I have a point at all, it must be that when your used to something it is a hard to relearn but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Take what you like and make it better.

apinstein• 17 years ago

Our company makes a virtual tour player, and we recently spent a lot of time testing UI's for ease-of-use for a one-time user. Demo: http://tourbuzz.net/2392

We tried to eliminate a lot of clicking, and it completely backfired.

Why? Because people move the mouse to "explore". Just like in real world if you're in front of a vending machine or a menu, people like to "half point" at things to help them focus and get their bearings.

The idea of an interface without clicks is horrible. People feel trapped when they can't explore by moving the mouse around without consequence.

Also, people have been trained for 25 years to click on things. Heck most people can barely stand to single-click things! At this point my mom doesn't even realize you can single-click things and she effectively double-clicks everything.

Thus, if that demo is anything other than an experiment to make the points above it's a horrible idea.

ahoyhere• 17 years ago

Great marketing for a student project. Clever and fun. Not practical... but it doesn't have to be, it's a combination research / art project / thesis / marketing stunt. And in those senses, it works very well.

Gotta explore the unthinkable to come up with new things to think...

mgcross• 17 years ago

Using an eeepc with Ubuntu, the screen will dim after a couple of minutes without clicking. That's more a problem with Ubuntu's energy saving (or maybe the eeepc-specific kernel I'm running) than with the site, but it does underscore the presumption of clicking being linked to interfacing (scrolling does not keep the machine from starting the energy saving process - only clicking).

The site is a neat experiment, but I can't help but feel that most users are conditioned enough from previous flash sites and non-flash rollover actions (drop downs, tool tips, etc) that they would find it easy not to click.

The animation was more than a little sluggish on this poor atom processor. It could have been more effective and less distracting had the animations been limited to rollover/click interactions. I guess that's the case with most flash sites. I'd like to see the site executed using html and javascript.

hyposave• 17 years ago

As a programmer it does make me rethink the interface design concept. I really liked the whole timed button idea where you need to leave the mouse pointer on a button for a few seconds while a progress bars slowly activate the button. That could be a step towards elimanating spam or drunk emails.

Don't Click It

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