No idea what its called. And until now I never realised I wasn't alone.

*stands up* hi. My name is Geoff and i'm a compulsive text clicker*sits
down again*

+1 to your numbers :-)
On Apr 16, 2012 6:13 PM, "Joseph Clark" <jcl...@atlassian.com> wrote:

> Hi list!
>
> This is a bit of an odd request, but I'm yet to find the right incantation
> of search phrases that will yield results from the Internet - hopefully you
> can help!
>
> There is a certain subset of computer users who, when reading text on the
> screen, compulsively click or highlight text that they are reading on the
> screen (I am one of them!).  I didn't even know I was doing it until
> someone pointed it out to me whilst I was pairing with them a few years ago.
>
> One of our in-house products recently shipped a new milestone version
> internally with a new "feature" when viewing issues that allows you to
> instantly edit the content of the fields on the screen simply by simply
> clicking on them (turning the plain HTML into editable form controls
> on-the-fly). This is pretty neat, but as a serial text-clicker, this
> feature is downright infuriating.  I was happy to put this down as either a
> little personality quirk of my own, or merely some indication that I may be
> insane, but a quick straw poll of those nearby finds at least 3 other
> people who have the same behaviour, or some variant (one guy says he clicks
> on browser windows a lot as a muscle-memory thing to ensure the right
> browser window has focus).
>
> I'm trying to describe to the other team why this new feature sucks for
> some people, but I have no idea if that "some people" is one in ten users,
> or one in one million.  Have searched a bit online for information about
> this, but I don't really know what to search for. Does this user behaviour
> have a name? Are there other people like me out there (hello? hello?)? Any
> literature around on whether or not its a great idea to bind functionality
> to an innocuous user-action like text-selection or clicking in an
> apparently non-clickable area?
>
> Cheers!
> Joe.
>
>

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