The Underscore Archives

On 16/07/07, Oliver Humpage <oliver at watershed.co.uk> wrote:
> As Apple discovered with its terrible "thumbwheel volume control" in an
> earlier version of QuickTime player, trying to simulate real life interfaces
> on a computer screen often ends up being clunky and unusable.
>
> While a page flip looks nice the first couple of times, it's annoying to
> have to click and drag - and even if there was a separate link to click
> "next" on, you still have to wait for the page flip animation to occur.
>
> Page-flipping is also something you should only have to do in real life:
> online, the searching/browsing facilities ought to be good enough to prevent
> you having to flip through a virtual catalogue...
>
> I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but I'd have thought it should be used
> only in very specialist circumstances.

+1. It's a recipe for RSI, IMNSHO, and is normally an indication that
you're making the website for the owner, not the user.

Repeat after me: "users are (usually) after information, not entertainment"*

> Oliver (who's probably too grumpy on Monday mornings).

Nah - someone has to question the wisdom of this particular interface metaphor.

Tim

* Unless the point of the site is entertainment, e.g. YouTube, which -
incidentally - has been said to have better findability than the
average company intranet:
http://magia3e.wordpress.com/2007/06/28/so-wheres-the-social-computing-tools-dude/