

Don't Click It - jmonegro
http://www.dontclick.it

======
Kejistan
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.

~~~
cduan
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.

~~~
thorax
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.

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jasonkester
Perhaps they couldn't get the domain
<http://automaticallyclickeverythingfor.me> ?

I mean really, it's just like using a normal UI while maniacally clicking as
fast as possible. Every nav item you hover over gets selected. Every text
field gets entered. Every button you move past gets pressed. It's like that
Atari 2600 joystick with the "autofire" switch.

I went through their alternative button ideas. Two of them I "clicked"
unintentionally. One of the I couldn't get to "click" at all.

All in all, they've successfully proved that this is a bad idea.

------
aaronblohowiak
Made me motion sick, but I am prone to such things. I hate actions on mouse
over. Mousing over is the byproduct of what I actually want to do, which is
select things. Having an ever-present, single, cursor is a huge limitation of
interfaces. Using mouse-over as the primary interface modality reinforces this
limitation.

Edit: the subtle change in color or background that shows the _potential_ for
activation is an exception to hating mouse-over responses.

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philwelch
Since the "don't click" style of interface is diametrically opposed to the
very idea of selecting text to copy and paste (well, unless they rework it to
use key commands from text editors) I have to screenshot and transcribe this
from the site:

"DONTCLICK.IT is the final artwork of the author's diploma in Communication
Design at the University Essen-Duisburg, Germany."

I was _wondering_ who on earth would research user interfaces that
diametrically oppose the instincts and conditioned behaviors of nearly all
computer users. Now it suddenly makes sense.

This isn't to say it isn't cool or interesting, but it seems awful in
usability terms.

------
jf
Last time I saw this I was in a lot of pain from RSI, it _hurt_ to click on
things. I spent a long time looking to see if somebody had found a way to
replace the Mac OS X buttons with "no click" buttons like they have on that
site.

Next I looked to see if I could find software that would let me use a key on
my keyboard as a mouse click. I didn't find anything that seemed easy or
free...

------
jonke
I liked it first, using a eeepc and only thouchpad it was comfortable, then I
tried some of the labs stuff and got disappointed.

I realize that there are some hardwired behaviours on how I interact. 1) I
keep hitting :q or ZZ in anything that looks like a texteditor, even in emacs.
2) I keep hitting ctrl-a on every line that have a cursor. 3) wsad and
boomstick on 1 and rocketlaucher on 2

I don't think that I should be the reference for how a user should interact
with a specific program or site. There are some areas where you could minimize
the number of clicks like we have now days more or less removed the use of
dialogues and wizardzzzzz.

Mouse and clicks are good but a thouchpad interface maybe should not pretend
to be a mouse.

I know that HN is leaning more or less to web user interface but there are
actually still a number of usage of interfaces to computer[programs] that
don't is a browser or the toplevel GUI of your OS.

I guess there is some site where those making all these kinds of new games to
DS,PS?,XBOX? discuss more or less the same kind of things but from a different
angle.

My kinds don't look for wsad , the look for a stylus or the stick. The don't
click instead they press X or blue button.

If I have a point at all, it must be that when your used to something it is a
hard to relearn but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Take what you
like and make it better.

------
dylanz
One day I hope I'll be able to "natively" browse the internet, graphics,
videos and all... in a terminal window, or, something fully compatible with
Vim/Emacs bindings.

~~~
dylanmcd
Like vimperator? I use it, and I love it. In fact, I'm thinking about moving
to a windows manager such as awesome or Xmonad for a completely mouseless
experience.

Vimperator - <http://vimperator.mozdev.org>

Awesome - <http://awesome.naquadah.org/>

Xmonad - <http://www.xmonad.org>

~~~
anthonyb
There's also Ratpoison - <http://www.nongnu.org/ratpoison/>

------
apinstein
Our company makes a virtual tour player, and we recently spent a lot of time
testing UI's for ease-of-use for a one-time user. Demo:
<http://tourbuzz.net/2392>

We tried to eliminate a lot of clicking, and it completely backfired.

Why? Because people move the mouse to "explore". Just like in real world if
you're in front of a vending machine or a menu, people like to "half point" at
things to help them focus and get their bearings.

The idea of an interface without clicks is horrible. People feel trapped when
they can't explore by moving the mouse around without consequence.

Also, people have been trained for 25 years to click on things. Heck most
people can barely stand to single-click things! At this point my mom doesn't
even realize you _can_ single-click things and she effectively double-clicks
everything.

Thus, if that demo is anything other than an experiment to make the points
above it's a horrible idea.

------
mgcross
Using an eeepc with Ubuntu, the screen will dim after a couple of minutes
without clicking. That's more a problem with Ubuntu's energy saving (or maybe
the eeepc-specific kernel I'm running) than with the site, but it does
underscore the presumption of clicking being linked to interfacing (scrolling
does not keep the machine from starting the energy saving process - only
clicking).

The site is a neat experiment, but I can't help but feel that most users are
conditioned enough from previous flash sites and non-flash rollover actions
(drop downs, tool tips, etc) that they would find it easy not to click.

The animation was more than a little sluggish on this poor atom processor. It
could have been more effective and less distracting had the animations been
limited to rollover/click interactions. I guess that's the case with most
flash sites. I'd like to see the site executed using html and javascript.

------
dan_the_welder
Well, I hate flash and those popup link things because they break my learned
work flow. I use the mouse to keep track of where I am in the text, to
highlight, pop links into new windows, do Google searches and most importantly
as an outlet for my ADD/OCD. So when the interface starts doing random stuff I
get forcibly removed from my concentration. I am not against this kind of
thing, but it belongs in certain specific places with lots of warnings before
it happens and an opt-out if you expect me to use your site.

------
mitko
I like the idea to reduce clicking, but eliminating it seems to create more
confusion than easiness. On the other side, maybe it will be cool to have a
mouse which doesn't need force to click- maybe that would reduce RSI (I am not
specialist and cannot say for sure). For example what if the mouse had
touchpad instead of buttons?

------
hyposave
As a programmer it does make me rethink the interface design concept. I really
liked the whole timed button idea where you need to leave the mouse pointer on
a button for a few seconds while a progress bars slowly activate the button.
That could be a step towards elimanating spam or drunk emails.

------
dpifke
This would work a lot better if the mouse pointer was hidden when not in
motion.

The problem I had with it was when I moved my mouse to read the text
underneath the pointer, I would occasionally leave the target area and have it
disappear out from under me.

------
stuntgoat
I was at the Maker Faire last Saturday and there was a company that had a true
multi-touch screen that was very large ( something like 20" ). I can see how
this would be useful when using a touch interface: I would not want to tap the
screen. Great work!

------
nopassrecover
Neat idea - I kind of like the mouseover awesomeness of Windows 7 which this
in concept reminds me of. But I couldn't do without clicking - it's a tactile
confirmation.

------
imd
Something that I think is similar is dwell-clicking software (for disabled
people, I think--just like the one-handle faucet).

------
daleharvey
quite old but its a really good experiment, while clicking seems fine for now,
its a nightmare a lot of the time on touch screen interfaces, even clicking
with my trackpad is annoying.

while its not completely without its annoyances, considering the limitations
it handles itself pretty well, and is certainly a worthwhile experiment.

~~~
jerf
It was a very good experiment; it proved to me it's a bad idea and could never
work. No sarcasm. Negative results are results.

It's demo-ware. Part of what I mean by that term are things that look good in
the demo, but it turns out the demo is pushing the idea to the very limits. A
demo of a good idea by necessity can only scratch the surface, not exhaust the
idea. With demoware, it only works as long as you don't bring the idea into
contact with the real world. It looks _great_ as long as you stay in demoland,
but that's it. See also: Purely visual general-purpose programming languages,
3D avatar-based chatting ( _not_ a game that also functions as a limited chat
room, pure 3D chat).

~~~
daleharvey
it didnt prove that to me at all.

see the iphone, a usual way of scrolling it to click somewhere around the
scrollbar, that obviously sucks especially on a small touch screen, so they
use clickless gestures.

while this experiment may not have directly influenced the iphone devs, it may
have, and its in the same direction.

our interfaces are terrible at the moment, anything that pushes innovation
into smarter ways of working with computers is good in my book.

I do agree that as a demo they pushed it to its limits, and that a lot of the
cases its impractical, but there are positive lessons to be learnt that can be
applied in real situations (like the iphone)

~~~
jerf
"they use clickless gestures."

This is some fantastic new definition of "clickless" which I have been
previously unaware of. You never remove your finger from the surface of your
iPhone? I think you may be doing it wrong.

~~~
daleharvey
urm, I dont see what that has to do with the scroll gestures, unless you count
swiping your finger across the screen as "clicking", which it isnt

~~~
jerf
You're sort of right, but not in the direction you think you are. Finger
swipes and gestures carry _more_ information than clicking. The entire point
of the clickless interface is for the user to convey _less_ information that
clicking; as I've referred to it in another context, the author believes that
the solution to the problems of "point and grunt" interfaces is to reduce it
to a "point" interface.

Modern mouse interfaces actually have more types of grunts (like the
relatively recent scrollwheel innovation), and the iPhone multitouch is a way
to get several types of grunts onto a touchscreen that previous had just tap
and drag. Totally the opposite direction from this demo. If the iPhone
developers carried anything away from this Flash demo, it was to head further
away from this approach.

Interestingly, I was about to post a conclusion to this post based on how
nobody has ever adopted this interface for anything, but I just realized that
as of yesterday (in the US), I am wrong. Totally serious. The new DS game
Knights in the Nightmare uses this interface for combat. It is adapted to the
touchscreen by making a persistent cursor that simply stays still if you
remove the stylus (which in general is a bad idea in the game), and if you
then touch some other part of the screen, the cursor will head straight for it
with a maximum speed (so no teleporting around the screen). Weapons are
deployed with dragging, commands are triggered with hovering and some light
gesturing, and so on. It's interesting, but it's also a decent demonstration
of why you don't want to use this for serious work. It's one thing when you
trigger the wrong unit in a game, it's quite another when you delete the wrong
file.

Metacritic page for the game:
[http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/knightsinthenig...](http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ds/knightsinthenightmare)

So, if you want to see who's right, you can now go try this interface out for
a real product.

~~~
daleharvey
its getting late so cant reply properly, but

I dont believe the clickless interface is trying to make the user convey less
information, but instead its trying to interpret information the user is
already conveying in a smarter way, so they dont have to produce redundant
information (the clicks).

Im sure I know of one or two good uses of this in practice, but its late and
they arent coming to me right now.

~~~
jerf
"I dont believe the clickless interface is trying to make the user convey less
information,"

This is a matter of information theory. It is an objective fact that only
moving a mouse provides less information than a mouse that can also click.
That is also why using this inferface is slower than using a conventional
interface; you have to convey the same number of bits, but you have a smaller
bandwidth to do it in. It is also, now that I think about it, a relatively
decent explanation of why I consider this demoware; cutting down the bandwidth
from human to computer certainly does have the effect of simplifying the
interface, but only by slowing the user down and constraining the amount of
information that can be extracted from the user. Throw this interface at a
real problem with even more bits needing to be extracted from the user and the
problems and slowdown will only compound. I don't think that most of us are
looking to be slowed down.

In that entire paragraph, only that last sentence is opinion. The rest is a
very simple application of information theory.

If you feel like you have to argue with that fact, I suggest brushing up on
your information theory first. I'm not kidding about the objective fact bit.
If you'd like to argue that interfaces should be based on reducing the amount
of information extracted from the user, feel free, that is a conceivable
argument, but it certainly flies in the face of experience and current
interface developments.

(By the way, why am I being so harsh? It's education, albeit more for the
audience than anybody else. Liking this interface as art is great, heck even I
think it's sort of cool that way, but thinking it's actually a useful
revolution is a sign that you are applying very weak thought processes to the
idea, and it's helpful to see things like the simple application of
information theory to the topic.)

~~~
daleharvey
"In that entire paragraph, only that last sentence is opinion. The rest is a
very simple application of information theory."

urm, only the first sentence is an "objective fact", the rest is your opinion
and fuzzy attempts at reasoning, if you are going to patronise, please be
right.

while its true that the interface is sending less information, its entirely
your opinion that there is not enough information already being sent by the
user to determine what exactly they want to do.

thousands of people have installed mouse gesture plugins, the xbox natal
project looks to be an entirely gesture driven, the idea that this type of
interface is pie in the sky "art", as opposed to a useful experiment is well,
wrong.

I usually wouldnt mind discussing this more but you have pretty much put me
off any further conversation.

and please note I said "worthwhile experiment", not "revolutionary"

------
cLive
Very pretentious. Too much movement.

------
ahoyhere
Great marketing for a student project. Clever and fun. Not practical... but it
doesn't have to be, it's a combination research / art project / thesis /
marketing stunt. And in those senses, it works very well.

Gotta explore the unthinkable to come up with new things to think...

------
access_denied
It made me calm, like medidation (or medication?). I guess I like it. I can
imagine to have something like that for an ebook-reader style app.

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zackattack
I can't wait until I can navigate the internet using ERPs!

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GrandMasterBirt
its fucking horrible... Just mouse-overs and shit moving my mouse is no longer
possible to just keep track of where im reading, instead i can't stop shit
from radically changing on me. Most of the time shit was just popping out
without a click or anything. Very annoying I could not use it for more than 1
minute.

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akkartik
Can someone please correct the title so I don't have to stare at crappy
english at the top of my HN page?

