Sunday, November 05, 2006

Pet Peeve

I'm grumpy this weekend, so I'm going to post a pet peeve.

Something that I'm seeing increasingly often online that bugs the hell out of me is windows that don't move.

Today's Offender:
Got to local.live.com and click on the about button. Looks like a window, right? In FireFox, I tried to move it, and ended up selecting a bunch of text. Grrr. Arrgh.

This is basic UI stuff. It has to be, as I'm not a UI guy, but I've heard this so many times :-) If your new thingimijig doesn't work like a <common thing X>, then please don't make it look like a <common thing X>. Find another common thing Y that should be expected to work like your thingimijig.

I realise I've offered a problem rather than a solution here, so I'll offer a better way for this example. I can understand the intent to keep the user immersed in the gorgeous web app. I suggest that they just get rid of the top bar on that window (making it no longer look like a window), keeping the close button where it is. This also gets rid of one of the two identical "About" titles that are back to back.