Since it was posted on the ever-excellent Searchviews a few days ago, we’ve been investigating the curious interface at Dontclick.it This AM, we also noticed that Bokardo picked up on it too. As Porter says, it’s cool. But, as is so often the case with such things, we weren’t fully satisfied. Granted, as the creators of the site themselves write, it’s an experiment. And from that point of view, it’s terrific. But as a foundation for a new kind of navigation, we think it comes up short - even if the stats on the site itself seem to be disagreeing with us.

In a nutshell, one fundamental aspect of usability relates to control: does a user of an interface feel like they can manage the environment? This also ties in closely with expectations, another vital area for usability. If an interface is hard to manage and consistently confounds expectations, it’s not working. And in business terms (leaving aside usability) this means lost opportunity and profit.

In talking with Jon and Nick about Dontclick.it, we kept coming back to the control issue. Clickable interfaces are good fundamentally because - in addition to being efficient - they are easy for someone to regulate. Not too much happens until you pause and push a button. One of the stated assumptions behind this site, however, is that - although a click is “the perfect mechanism to navigate content” - moving the mouse around when not clicking “mostly results in dead space/time.” The idea seems to fill that dead time with interactivity.

Again, this is a cool thought: take away the click and make the site somehow more rather than less interactive. Bold. But the problem from our perspective is that the between-click time isn’t dead. Something may not be happening at the interface level, but it usually is for the user. Most people move the mouse around the screen to explore the interface - even though simple motion usually doesn’t do anything. And that’s the point. Most people are in fact doing something quite important between clicks. They are either learning, or they are pausing. And not having the interface change during that time is usually important to them - at least in our experience.

So the obstacle imposed by Dontclick.it is essentially one of unintended consequences. The interface is incredibly sensitive. If you shift even a bit, it changes. Now, rollover interactivity is an excellent, excellent tool in many cases - like a tabbed tool that shows before/after data, or menus that dropdown but which are also partially transparent. But in this case, it makes the interface a bit like a minefield. Every little twitch causes something to blow up.

To some extent, this is mediated by a fairly logical navigation scheme - but we still found it a little frustrating. Reading through the “understand” section, for instance, is a somewhat unnecessary exercise in precise motor control just to keep focused on the text. If the main point of the interface was just to make things expand, grow and change, it would be great. But as soon as there’s a different kind of data transmission requirement - reading some dense text, moving from one page to the next - it gets a little trickier. And then there’s the other basic problem with Flash - from an URL perspective, there’s just one. So it’s not easy to link to different parts of the site - from, say, this blog post.

All in all, we look forward to the ways in which this experiment gets modified based on the user data being collected. But we’re not sure its a matter of just fixing bugs here and there…in terms of total interface design. Likely there are some valuable things about specific types of clickless navigation that can be concluded. But we doubt that anyone will want to build a whole new site based around excluding The Click for actual business purposes anytime soon.

JF

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2005 at 9:35 am and is filed under General, Usability, Flash and Usability, Interaction Strategy.