37signals and the pain of the below-the-fold button

Brian Dillard, Wednesday, April 30, 2008 @ 3:03 pm

Google Notebook finally got a feature I've been asking for since the beginning: The ability to remember whether I want my notebooks sorted alphabetically or by date of last update. When the service launched, notebooks were always sorted by last update. When they finally added the option of alphabetical sorting, they left out the ability to make your choice sticky across sessions. This little wrinkle annoyed me almost as much as the Google Calendar search box's default action of searching public calendars rather than my own. I can't believe what a difference it makes in your relationship with a webapp when you don't curse out loud every time you use it.

Many users have the tendency to get bent out of shape about deficiencies in a tiny, tertiary portions of an application - or, for that matter, an operating system. Mac users devote entire forums to complaining about changes to, or lack of changes to, the Dock. PC users are still cursing those stupid Windows XP "You have unused icons on your desktop" messages. When we spend increasingly endless stretches of our lives in front of a terminal, tiny annoyances add up.

I call this the Disproportionately Annoying Detail Syndrome, or DADS. It has a tendency to flare up worst when you're working late on a short deadline and your computing environment fails to read your mind.

A couple of years ago, when I first started abandoning desktop software for cloud computing, I gave Ta-Da List a shot. I couldn't get over the placement of the "Add another item" command. Instead of putting it at the top of the list, they stuck it at the bottom. Every time I wanted to add a task, I had to scroll down to the bottom of the page before I could start typing. I worked with this system for about a week before jumping ship to Remember the Milk, where I can hit the "t" key to add a task without ever picking up my mouse.

Sadly, as much as I admire 37signals as a company, their "minimal features for minimalists" approach doesn't mesh with my design philosophy. And because they're so influential in the Rails world, tons of Rails projects seem to end up with that 37signals-style user interface.

Radiant CMS is a worthy piece of software. I've blogged about it endlessly. We use it for the Pathfinder website. But it Drives. Me. Crazy. The "New Snippet" button is at the bottom of the Snippets page - below the 50-plus snippets that make up our site. The "Clear Page Cache" button - which I need to click every time I update a snippet, a layout or a page - is located only on the Pages tab. It should be located on the Snippets and Layouts tabs, too. At the very least, it should be at the top of the Pages page rather than all the way at the bottom.

Radiant is an open-source project, and I could probably hack it to meet my own standards for humane interface design. But its plug-in architecture doesn't really account for radical changes to the overall UI of the application.

At this point I'm just ranting, if not rambling, but I guess my point is this:

Minimalism doesn't need to mean blind adherence to simplistic interface patterns. A simple interface can be a powerful one. If you follow proper user interface design practices, your users will show you how they expect to interact with your application. If you can shave time off of repetitive activities, then do so!

Commonly used commands, for instance, should be located above the fold - especially  when they will be accessed immediately after the page loads. This isn't a holy commandment, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb.

The corollary is also true: If a command will typically be accessed only after the user has read/consumed/interacted with the entire page, then it should go at the bottom. As I was editing this post in Typepad, I noticed a typo in the last paragraph. Then I had to scroll all the way back up to the top to click "Re-Edit this post."

That's three-quarters of a second I'll never get back.

agile ajax

Comments: 2 so far

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1. 

   glad / sad to see i’m not the only one with high blood pressure.

   Comment by Raoul Duke, Thursday, May 1, 2008 @ 4:31 pm

2. 

   You might be interested in this recent posting I read on their blog: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/988-designing-details-autoscrolling-the-edit-state

   Comment by Hates_, Thursday, May 1, 2008 @ 5:44 pm

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