On Monday, January 19, 2004, at 04:03 PM, Taco Fleur wrote:
Agreed, a lot of users are not dumb, so they also understand that its a button even when on mouseover the cursor turns into a hand|pointer, so it would be more wise (IMHO) to think about that % that is not so familiar with the web.
They will be familiar with the OS before they are familiar with the web. Browser and OS default buttons LOOK like buttons, and behave (more or less) the same across all applications. This is called familiarity. Familiarity is a very strong part of user experience.
In your own oppinion, do you think a new internet user or inexperienced user would understand that he can click the button when it turns into a hand|pointer or when the cursor does nothing when moving over the button?
I believe if the W3 had set this as a recommendation, then it would be a good thing, but since they haven't, they have left it up to the browser and Operating System manufacturers to decide what happens.
The user becomes familiar with those defaults. Whether they're better or worse defaults in nearly irrelevant, because of basic numbers involved.
There are millions or even billions of web pages out there. Even if you, and all your friends, and all their friends all decided to implement this cursor, you'd still be in the minority (not even .001% of all pages), hence you would be going against:
- what the W3 recommends (or has not recommended) - what most (if not all) UA's and OS's do by default - what the user is familiar with
Do you really want to do that???
I have seen people style buttons so that they blend in with the whole desing, see http://www.zeldman.com scroll to the bottom, see that button, if the cursor changed on mouse-over it would have been much clearer that its a clickable object.
To me anyway.
That's all fine, but the point is that this behaviour you want to implement (which nobody is stopping from doing) is not the default behaviour for most UA's... implementing it means changing the way a user's OWN ENVIRONMENT behaves and responds.
Again, do you really want to do that?
Exactamento! A user always has to learn the interface, buttons can always be different, so what IF the cursor ALWAYS turned into a hand|pointer how much quicker will they understand your interface?
Not as quick as leaving the button alone and living with the default styling and behaviour that they KNOW and LOVE and TRUST.
Let's look at it from the other angle. A hand|pointer is what people rely on for links -- it says so in the W3 specs as well. Since designers though it'd be cool to remove underlines from links, and change the colour of them (both of which I'm guilty of too) THIS IS THE ONLY VISUAL CUE that this is a link to another page/resource.
Buttons are not links. In fact, clicking on quite a lot of buttons will/may produce no new page at all (think about any client-side JS action, including form validation).
Your argument may be to only change the button to a pointer on all buttons which WILL result in a new page, but then that's adding more and more confusion.
No matter what your argument, I'll more than likely come back with this:
The user should have to learn as little as possible, and should have as much consistency and familiarity as possible. If the W3, Microsoft, Apple or even Mozilla decide that all buttons should have pointer icons, I'll be fine with it -- because the user of that browser/OS will become familiar with it very quick, and it will become their standard too.
If one designer (or even a bunch of them) choose to implement it on their own, I think it's stupid, because it changes the behaviour of the interface.
Justin French
*****************************************************
The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
*****************************************************
