Designers: Don't cover what I'm looking at

http://paulferrett.com/2014/please-stop-covering-what-im-looking-at/

by paulferrett • 12 years ago

41 14 12 years ago

dyarosla• 12 years ago

Totally agree. It's been bothering me for a while too- I never fully realized it was because I would generally guide my mouse towards it as I'm looking at it.

jmgrosen• 12 years ago

As a dissenting opinion, I like this pattern. I generally don't move my mouse over something unless I want to interact specifically with it.

cardiffspaceman• 12 years ago

I like a sense of feedback but some feedback designs are worse than no feedback. Some smart designer right now is writing "Hover feedback considered harmful."

hkailahi• 12 years ago

I agree. Even if I wasn't looking to click on some section, the mouse icon would be distracting if it was directly on top of whatever I was trying to look at.

TheLoneWolfling• 12 years ago

Alternatively: don't display information only on mouseover. My mouse is not tied to my eyes.

stcredzero• 12 years ago

This goes double for fancy dialogs that float over my content! (Especially the ones that follow me as I scroll!)

mkesper• 12 years ago

Many sites are unusable without adblocking due to this.

tzs• 12 years ago

This problem also can show up for people who scroll with a mouse wheel or trackpad gesture, and so do not have to have the cursor over a scroll bar to scroll. My cursor is usually near where I last clicked on the page, and it is annoying when I then scroll and things start popping in and out of existance as they scroll under the cursor.

I find it annoying to have to go find a safe spot to park after I click on something so I can scroll without triggering things.

slavik81• 12 years ago

Downvoting a well-asked stackoverflow question out of dislike for the design of the website the asker was building seems unduly harsh, especially as the author hasn't actually even seen the website.

userbinator• 12 years ago

This trend might've come from existing desktop UIs with clickable elements that didn't show any obvious signs of being clickable - I believe XP's visual style was the first to have subtly changing buttons on mouseover, and that spread over to web design. Then maybe someone thought it wasn't obvious enough, so they made mouseover changes even more obvious and attention-getting, to the point of being distracting.

I find that a lot of web designs considered "modern" now are certainly excellent at being attention-getting and flashy, but have much lower information content and usability -- it's the equivalent of someone screaming in your face, and more loudly than before. It might be a reflection of lowered attention spans in general, or a contributor to it; I don't know.

I would hope that the cursor changing from an arrow to a pointer hand is obvious enough that something is clickable...

arghbleargh• 12 years ago

For me the pointer hand is a little too subtle. I prefer to have the border highlighted on mouseover, which gives a strong visual indication without obscuring the content.

I have to agree though that modern designs, while slick, are often no more usable than designs from the 2000s. For example, take the point about vague icons near the end of the article. Even though you can often guess roughly what those icons do, that moment of uncertainty when you click them to see what happens creates a jarring user experience that could have been avoided with a few words of text.

A major contributing factor to this trend in design is obviously the emphasis on mobile devices (e.g. sometimes you have to use those small icons due to limited screen sizes). It annoys me that a lot of this mobile-driven design gets copied over to the desktop even when the same constraints no longer apply. Unfortunately, this is not completely without reason. To me, words like "refresh" are less ambiguous than circular arrows, but maybe to someone who grew up using only tablets and iphones, the circular arrow is more familiar.

nitrogen• 12 years ago

I would hope that the cursor changing from an arrow to a pointer hand is obvious enough that something is clickable...

Surely there should be some indication before you even interact with it though, no? At least an underline, a different color, etc.

dddrh• 12 years ago

A company I really like has this problem. [1] When I think of getting a new film pack, I find myself doing a "mouse dance" where I look at the photos and then they disappear followed by moving the mouse over another photo.

[1] http://vsco.co/film

peterbraden• 12 years ago

Here's the thing, big affordances are good UI, so making the entire image a click target is a good idea. _Especially_ because of mobile. On mobile, nobody is dragging a cursor anywhere. The mobile market is more important for designers than the small demographic that uses a mouse wrong.

Designers: Don't cover what I'm looking at

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