Tag: ‘user interface’ · TangleBones

Challenges for Google Chrome on the Mac

Chrome has been get­ting a lot of atten­tion (well, from me anyway) and it’s well-​deserved. Many Apple fans - like me - are excited about the idea of Google’s fancy new browser coming to the Mac.

But my absolute favorite fea­ture of Chrome isn’t some­thing that will trans­late as well on the Mac. Chrome, when max­i­mized, places your tabs all the way at the top of the screen, which makes click­ing them much easier. Fitt’s law tells us that “the time [and effort] required to rapidly move to a target area [is] a func­tion of the dis­tance to the target and the size of the target.” Mouse tar­gets that are against the edge of the screen are much easier to hit because you don’t have to aim nearly as pre­cisely. User inter­face experts like to say that but­tons at the top of the screen are infi­nitely tall. Icons in the cor­ners - like the Start button or the close window button of a max­i­mized window on a Win­dows com­puter - are infi­nitely wide and tall - they require almost no effort to target.

Which brings us back to Chrome. When max­i­mized - the usual way of run­ning browsers on Win­dows com­put­ers - its tabs are much easier to click than those of any other browser because you only really have to aim left or right. Since chang­ing tabs is one of the most fun­da­men­tal parts of brows­ing in a tabbed browser, about the only thing Google could do to make the expe­ri­ence even better would be to place the back button all the way in the top left corner since that’s the most com­monly used inter­face ele­ment in a browser.

But this doesn’t trans­late to the Mac at all. On the Mac, almost noth­ing runs max­i­mized. More impor­tantly, because Apple’s inter­face design­ers rec­og­nize the impor­tance of Fitt’s law, the top edge of the screen is reserved for the menu bar. Even plac­ing the tabs at the left, right or bottom of the screen doesn’t work since people are likely to have their dock in one of those places.

Chrome intro­duces a lot of other inter­est­ing new fea­tures to web brows­ing, espe­cially under the hood, but for me the “tabs at the top” is its best fea­ture. Now that exten­sions are sup­pos­edly in Google’s plans and prox­ies allow you to block ads in Chrome, many of my reser­va­tions about using it are dis­ap­pear­ing. So how will con­vert me on the Mac? What sort of answers will they come up with for the inter­face improve­ments on my plat­form of choice?

Unnecessarily Large

The check­out process at Tee­Fury ends with this lovely bit of inter­face design:

Oh, they say it’s unnec­es­sar­ily large, but I love it all the same. Just what a check­out needs: giant easy-​to-​read but­tons with funny copy. A+!

I also love their con­cept: one tee-​shirt a day, up to 3 shirts per cus­tomer, $9 each, and $2 ship­ping. Couldn’t be sim­pler. And obvi­ously I picked up the inau­gural tee for me and Sierra. Now all they need is a feed.