Slip-Sliding Away

For a long time, the "drag" concept has been abused by software developers.  If you don't like the tool bar at the top of the window, you can drag it to the bottom.  If you don't like the order the buttons are in, you can drag them into another order.  It's easier for the designers than having some super-complicated "preferences" dialog box that the user has to hunt through the menus to find.

The problem with dragging is that on modern software, everything is draggable, so there's a good chance of mistakenly using the feature.  You go to press a button on the toolbar, but your hand slips at the wrong time, and you end up dragging the button off the toolbar, and you have no idea how to get it back.  Sure, it's not often that you make that mistake, but it's probably more common than deciding you want to rearrange the buttons.

It seems that for mobile devices, "sliding" is going to be the technique that developers over-use.  The big user-experience challenge on phones and tablets is coping with the small screens, and an easy solution is allowing the user to switch between different displays by swiping the screen as if pushing the screen to the side.

But using the Toronto Star mobile web page today, I realized the problems with that.  They currently have it set up so that you can pan down the screen to scroll through the article (as with any web page) or you can swipe horizontally to get to the next article.  It sounds like a good arrangement, but it's not implemented very well, for the simple reason that it can't seem to figure out which way you're swiping.  If your finger isn't moving directly up or down right from the start of the swipe, it starts the screen moving to the side, and doesn't seem to notice that the rest of your movement is vertical.  So instead of reading the second paragraph of the article about new money designs, I'm reading about how the TTC is struggling to keep pigeons out of the subway.

So developers, please don't abuse this concept any further.  Restrict yourself to only one dimension of movement, say.