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by Kejistan 6218 days ago
Interesting site, but I really cannot understand why the mouse click is a "bad" thing. Having pages do nothing unless you explicitly click is a great thing, that site showed me exactly how annoying it can be to control an interface that wants to rearrange itself all the time based on mouse movements. Moving the mouse to a link and having the link move AWAY because you happened to move across one of the links between it and your mouse is simply annoying.
5 comments

Exactly, when scrolling though a list the first item stays on the top and the next item on the bottom. This is a horrible interface. They could "improve" it by having a navigation area, and a viewable area as separate things, but then you need to exit the navigation area to get to the next stage. But, then you need a complex mouse movement to exit the navigation area and get to where you want to be. The true value of a click is the clear delineation that this is what I want.

On the other hand it looks cool.

Interface tries to intelligently rearrange itself, and ends up annoying user? Reminds me of that old MS Office "feature" of hiding unused menu items, which bugged me like crazy.
Yeah, it really makes me feel paranoid that the item I want will be hidden when the menu is shown, so I always expanded it (until I turned it off entirely).

I'm probably the only one who feels the same way about hidden tooltray icons, too, but I usually expose them all on Windows.

IMHO there is nothing here intrinsically better about the experience - what they seem to have done is simply take a good old Flash interface and ripped out the click and replaced it with mouseover events.

Sorry, but I think you have to go a few steps further if you really want to seamlessly eliminate the click (which begs the question: why?).

The UI was annoying - the same UI that I've run into for the new Sims game - an over-reliance on mouse-over events, popping menus in and out of existence based on minute, often accidental motion. You have no idea how hard it is to, say, buy a bed and choose the wood finish for your Sim, just because the UI sucks.

There is a case when clicking is bad: in some mouseless interfaces like those based on computer vision. I once worked on one of those and had the user freely move his hand over the space to explore some icons (while having a VR headset covering his head). This interface would have been ideal for such kind of project, really.
They're not suggesting click is bad. It's the equivalent of link-bait: An excuse to get you to try their mouse-over.

...which I consider annoying eye-candy. Eye candy that melt and drips uncontrollably for that matter. For me the reaction is more like the other who complained of motion sickness. For this user, please leave menu bars static (unless you're expanding content: like drop-down or slide-out menus). I'd rather have flashing, hopping ads in my peripheral vision (which I can tune out), that menus zipping around like eye-floaters.

[Sorry, maybe you caught me in a bad mood, but my mood tends to become bad when purposeless complexity (especially moving) intrudes.]