Just Because You Can Isn’t Good Enough

I read an interesting article this morning on creating honest user experiences on the web.  What was a little funny to me was that not more than five minutes after reading the article I ran into a prime example of exactly what the author of that article was talking about. 

One of my favorite things to do is browse the web looking at what people have done to create interesting web sites.  I ran across a design I thought was pretty cool and wanted to take a closer look at it so I clicked the link to the page.  It turned out that the site the page belonged to was no longer in existence and what I ended up with was one of those “This domain may be for sale” pages that are so prevelent these days across the ‘net.  Since it wasn’t even remotely what I was interested in I tried to close out of the window and got three pop ups as a reward for my actions.  Two of the pop ups went away when I clicked the standard “X” icon in the window to close it, but the third one popped up a second window, then when I tried to close out of that I got a Windows dialog box that was just an extension of the thing the window was advertising.  I had the option of clicking “OK” to stay on their page, or clicking some other button to do something else.  Knowing how dangerous it can be to click on things in random pop up boxes, I ended up going into Task Manager and killing my whole browser session.

Needless to say this was not a positive experience.

The experience did two things for me. First, it illustrated in very concrete terms exactly what the author of the aforementioned article was talking about.  Secondl,y it got me thinking about all of the nifty toys things like JavaScript, CSS, PHP, and other web technologies have to offer.  The ability to totally customize the end user’s web experience is pretty cool, especially when you take a moment and think about how boring (by today’s standards) the Internet of the 1990′s was, however that ability is a two edged sword.  On the one hand if used properly and with a little restraint it has the potential to take the web to some amazing new and exciting places.  On the other hand, if abused there is the potential to poison user’s experiences so even legitimate uses of these technologies will, at best, be viewed with extreme suspicion.

The point I’m trying to make here is that just because you can do something isn’t a good enough reason to do it.  Having the ability to alter the default functionality of a core element of Windows (or Mac OS, or whatever you happen to be using) might be a neat thing to do, but it should be done cautiously or not at all.  Users expect that the active window will close when they click on the little “X” icon in the corner.  If they’re in an application like Word or Excel, they might expect that a dialog will pop up to make sure they save their work before closing it.  Most users expect that when they click to close a browser window the window will simply close without causing a fuss.  Hijacking that button for any reason is just plain bad practice and creates not only a sense of frustration and suspicion, but damages the credibility of the web site.