Comments on: Expectations: When to be automagic, and when it makes sense to be explicit

By: Rhett

Rhett — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:58:27 +0000

Bang on! Of all companies, Google almost never irks.
On a slight tangent: I use Windows XP, and alert bubbles often pop up in the system tray. They are so irritating. You can’t like disable them forever which a youth like me would much love to interpret as a conspiracy of sorts of Microsoft. hehehe
Like in relationships, they really are the small and subtle things that matter!
So like talking more of those notification bubbles — if you wanna close them, there’s that tiny cross at the top right corner of the bubble that you gotta point your mouse to and click — and you wanna close them 99% of the time — and the rest of the space of the bubble, anywhere you click and the window that links to the bubble opens.
For notification the system tray shoots a bubble
It looks so clean and obvious
But trust you me it is Microsoft’s conspiracy subtle!

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:32:32 +0000

My usual feeling is that if an application is going to try and be clever and helpful, it has to be near on perfect at doing so. Any less, and it’s an annoyance that people will want to turn off. And once it’s turned off, it doesn’t matter if you subsequently make the feature better in the next release – because the user already has it disabled. You only get one shot at getting this kind of thing right.

By: Sebastian Redl

Sebastian Redl — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 09:19:51 +0000

One very annoying autocomplete feature of some editors is automatically adding braces of any sort. You know, you type
printf(
and it autocompletes to
printf()
with the cursor between the parentheses. But of course, you’re typing so quickly that you never notice and add the closing parenthesis yourself, so you end up with two.
Eclipse is very smart about this, remembering that the parenthesis was auto-added, and overwriting it if you type it explicitly.

On a side note, your anti-spam question is missing from the proper tab order.

By: Andraz Tori

Andraz Tori — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 08:40:04 +0000

Hi,

well maybe you just implemented autocomplete in a bit clumsy way. As Wladimir said it should never actually insert stuff without you approving it, this way you never get “listst”. For example OpenOffice autocomplete does a pretty good job at it.

Since we are also working on automagic tool at Zemanta, we’re discussing these kinds of things a lot. I’d be interested in your thoughts how blogging and text authoring in general could be improved by tools that understand the text to a certain degree beyond spell checking.

Andraz Tori, CTO at Zemanta

By: Boris

Boris — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 02:33:52 +0000

I’ve been coming to like mercurials approach to command completion, which is that it doesn’t complete stuff at type time (that’s just happening in your shell), but you can type any unique prefix. So you can do:

hg qseries
hg qserie
hg qseri
hg qser

and they all do the same thing. If you type

hg qse

you get:

hg: command ‘qse’ is ambiguous:
qselect qseries

Of course one can get used to typing “qser” and then suffer if a new command that starts with that string is added…. but if the command set is reasonably fixed, this lets people remember the abbreviations they want on their own time.

By: Charlie O'Keefe

Charlie O'Keefe — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:35:21 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of social web applications, and their interconnections.

Sure, it’s a nice idea to have a bunch of webapps using one another’s apis, until you have no clear idea of what information is being passed between them, and what action on your part might or might not result in some feed story or notification about your being blasted to all your friends.

Yes, these apps should do a lot for you, and they should be easy to use, but they should also make it very obvious to the user what they are doing with that user’s data.

By: Wladimir Palant

Wladimir Palant — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 18:24:26 +0000

That’s probably why pretty much every automatic autocomplete feature not only autocompletes but also selects the added text. So if you type “li” it will add and select “st”. If you then type “s” it will replace “st” (because of the selection) and autocomplete will add “t” – selected again of course. So you can type the command yourself – or you can press End to just accept the suggestion and continue typing.

By: Juan

Juan — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:59:42 +0000

There are many features like this, but you’ve just established one of the basics of interaction: don’t get in the way of the user, do things for the user when the user wants you to do them. Even though users choose between similar products that have certain features over others mostly for ideological reasons, it’s important to remember that imposing (even if the feature can be disabled) is never good. So if you want to allow command line completion to be turned on or off, remember to set the default to off.

Personally, I’ve been watching your development of Bespin for some time and based on that I think the best option would be to use something like Google Suggest, because it is a feature that could eventually be applied inside the code (ie: after typing “document.”) later on, and consistency is always a good choice.

Great post, great insight!