Potentially annoying features
I just installed The Unread, a menubar application that tells me how many unread messages I have in my inbox. For those of you who like to know when you have unread messages, but keep your dock — along with the Mail icon that shows the number of unread messages — hidden, then you may want to check out The Unread. It’s useful software, but it’s not the main reason for this entry.
The reason is this part of The Unread’s preferences window:
As someone who notices annoying software features nearly everyday, I found the “Potentially Annoying” note quite refreshing. While some users may find it useful to see an alert dialog when Mail isn’t running, other users like me will probably find it annoying. Just imagine if Microsoft Word’s preferences marked all of their potentially annoying features. How many user frustrations could be avoided? What other software could benefit from notes like this?
- 13 May 04
- interaction design, mac, microsoft, software
Comments
Seems to me if MS did this, they’re have an easier time just marking the ones that wouldn’t be potentially annoying.
While I understand what potentially annoying means in this context (lots of dialog windows), the term seems rather ambiguous and can’t really translate to too many other applications in my mind and though I was being facetious, there IS a limit to how many asterisks you can put to an application before they are just meaningless.
The better question to ask is, if it’s potentially annoying, is it potentially useless?
Kevin Cheng on 13 May 04
The better question to ask is, if it’s potentially annoying, is it potentially useless?
I asked myself the same thing while thinking about the idea. I think it depends on the user. Maybe the ever better question is, if it’s potentially annoying, how can the feature be improved so that it’s not potentially annoying for anyone?
There’s a lesson here somewhere: if you feel like a feature could be potentially annoying to anyone, rethink the feature, then trash it or improve it. Good software doesn’t annoy anyone.
Joshua on 14 May 04
I don’t think this asterisk is a benficial idea. You design an application with certain types of users in mind. If it’s a narrowly focussed application, you will know (you better know) if a feature is annoying. In that case, eliminate or change it. If you’re designing something for the general population, how are you to know what’s annoying or even potentially annoying?
In this case, there would be plenty of people and roles where instant and loud notification of new mail is important.
Jay Zipursky on 24 May 04
Hi all, I wrote this program and just wanted to make a comment regarding the “annoying == useless?” topic. While I agree with most of the points made toward the yes answer, I don’t necessarily think that every feature that might potentially be annoying to some — or even most — people is necessarily useless. For instance, Safari allows you to add URLs it finds in your address book to your bookmarks. Now, I would find that annoying because I don’t want said addresses in my bookmarks menu or bar. However, I’m quite sure that someone, somewhere finds this feature to be highly beneficial and useful and I certainly wouldn’t advocate the removal of functionality just because I personally find it annoying.
Not that I’m comparing The Unread to Safari, mind you…
All that said, I do plan on re-working some of the stuff in The Unread and I hope to make even the potentially annoying stuff much less annoying. I don’t conduct any focus group research or market feasibility studies or anything like that - I’m just one guy. I write my programs first for me and then after I release them I get a lot of email saying how other people would prefer this or that and I try to make it at least an option. And it really just depends on your preferences. I personally do use the dialog because 99% of the time that I’m logged in, Mail is running and if Mail is running I want TU to be running and vice versa but I totally understand why people might not want that so it’s an option. I don’t really think in this case it’s a “useless” feature — perhaps it could be improved, and I’m working on it, but I personally don’t find it useless. Mr. Kaufman does and I’m perfectly okay with that, that’s why I made it an option.
I guess that’s all I’m trying to say. ;)
Peter Schart on 7 Jun 04