can't use it » Safari 4 ditches loading bar

Safari 4 ditches loading bar

posted 15/06/2009 | 2 Comments »

I wondered why Apple decided to let go of the address bar that would fill up as a page loads, as it was an elegant UI that communicated what was happening.

Apparently this change was made to prevent users’ delusion that they had to wait until the bar completely filled up:

The big blue progress bar led to users waiting for mostly-loaded and usable pages. Removing it makes browsing effectively faster.

This sounds like how users think keyboards interaction is much faster even though they performed equally as well with mice.

posted under: ui&usability.

Comments

What? Keyboard commands are not faster? Where did you get that idea.
Imagine if you couldn’t use ctrl+c or ctrl+v, instead you could only use contextual menus and/or drop dowm menus.

Henrik on 15/06/2009 at 17:41

Hi Henrik,
I was referring to usability literature. I’d suggest you introduce yourself to, for example, “Tog on Interface”.

Quoting him,

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

* Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
* The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

admin on 15/06/2009 at 19:32