Here’s another installment in mouseover poorly-thought-out design.  This time, we’ll visit Google Voice (a great service BTW, do yourself a favor and check it out).

On their page, they have this as a left-hand menu:

Ok, looks innocuous enough, but if you want to click on “contacts” and you make the bad mistake of approaching that with your mouse from above, you glide over “More” which instead of a clickable drop-down, it is a mouseover drop-down.  So look what happens:

Oh dear, now I can’t click on “contacts”, can I?  Even WORSE… if you move the mouse over there and click on “contacts” quickly, the stupid popup whips out under your mouse and grabs your click!! Now you get “recorded calls” or “Placed calls” and have to dismiss that in order to get what you really wanted.

This is irritating UI design and is poorly thought out.  Users shouldn’t be surprised by getting something they didn’t intend, and they shouldn’t have to creep up on menu options from the right direction in order to use them.  C’mon, Google, get a clue.

I can’t believe nobody caught that.  Must have been the same makeup artist enamored with the lip smudge.

I wish I had thought of this:

Having the mouse activate things (like help on what to put in a text field) just by hovering over some spot is pretty neat.  However, with this being used more and more, it’s starting to cross over from neat to annoying.

UI Guideline: If you are going to do a mouse-over help box for a form field, make sure that the pop-up text box containing the help doesn’t pop up over the field in the form!  Seems like an obvious thing, but most of the time the stupid things pop up right over top of where you are typing, and you can’t see what you are typing anymore.  That’s less than useful.  Also, keep the area for the pop-up trigger fairly small.  There are few things more annoying than shoving the mouse out of the way to type, and accidentally ending up over a pop-up trigger which either shows a big old help box right in your way, or even worse, triggers a drop-down for another field which grabs the keyboard and prevents  you typing where you wanted to type.

It’s all about politeness, really.  In short: Don’t get in my way, and don’t make me do things I don’t want to do right now.  You should try to minimize user irritation with user interfaces, and that’s fairly easy to do if you give a little thought to the design.  These days, I’m seeing too many user interfaces peppered with “whizzy features” which are more annoying than not.

We’ve been evaluating storage solutions at my company, and with the politics (both internal to our company, and external to the storage vendors), it is starting to feel like a soap opera.  So, I whipped this out:

Awhile ago, I blathered on about the Netflix price change, and how I’d noticed that it seemed to be backfiring for them with people I knew.  Still, I have yet to run into somebody who is now paying more to Netflix after their price restructuring.

Ars Technica posted an article confirming this: Netflix expects a million fewer subscribers in wake of plan change

This guy is really amazing (and as an amateur magician myself, I really appreciate his skill).  He’s very funny, and the way he fumbles around and looks like he’s disorganized is wonderful.

How cool, AirSwimmers has an interesting take on an indoors remote-controlled airship.  They make them in the shape of fish (Shark and Clownfish), and you propel them by waving their tail back and forth.