millennium | ten

Google Chrome's Options dialog box has perplexed some more traveled in the art of UI design with its unusual tab titles. Here's a brief explanation of why we ended up going with this arrangement:

A core value for us was to keep the number of options low. Obviously some options are necessary - your home page, your network settings, etc. Some things represent genuine user preferences and others represent configuration that might be specific to a given installation. What we didn't want to do was add a lot of choices that represented unresolved design decisions for the UI. This felt a little too much like "giving up" our responsibilities on the UI design team and making users to do our job.

At the end of the day, we ended up with a relatively small number of options. A simple sort of options into related categories proved problematic - the relationship between many of the choices was ambiguous. Some belonged in multiple categories. We quickly realized we'd end up with a lot of tabs that only had a few items in them.

So we went back and tried to think about what people would really want to get out of this UI. Mostly, people would be interested in changing their home page and other basic settings like that. Sometimes, people might like to change the default download folder or turn off password saving or something like that. Even less often, there might be a need to tweak proxy settings and make other lower level changes. So we did a sort by "most likely to be changed", and that's how we ended up with the grouping we have.

There are probably further improvements that could be made to our options dialog box, if we're lucky, we'll be able to remove a few more checkboxes. After working for several years on various sorts of options in numerous versions of Netscape and Firefox options dialog boxes though and watching the organizations that made sense at the time they were implemented become awkward when new features arrived, I'm not personally convinced any particular theme-based grouping scales well to the wide array of possible future modifications.

From the New Zealand Herald: "More than a third of motorists drive over the 50km/h speed limit." (emphasis mine).

Hold on a minute.

From the Wikipedia article on speed limits: "Traffic engineers may rely on the 85th percentile rule to establish speed limits. The speed limit should be set to the speed that separates the bottom 85% of vehicle speeds from the top 15%. ... The theory is that traffic laws that reflect the behavior of the majority of motorists may have better compliance than laws that arbitrarily criminalize the majority of motorists..."

Well that makes sense, doesn't it. But sense doesn't always apply when you're a nanny-state bent on protecting people from themselves. No, wait, hold on a minute... back to the Herald: "Police collect about $50 million a year from speeding fines, figures released to the Weekend Herald under the Official Information Act show."

Ah, that's the reason. Maybe if NZ had a well-funded traffic police as in olden times, they could focus on dangerous driving rather than pure speed (it's possible to drive dangerously within the speed limit), and then the police could go back to spending most of their time stopping people from being stabbed, beaten and shot in South Auckland...

Happy 2009. New year's brings some philosophical reflection on the decisions one makes, deliberate and accidental, that shape where one ends up.

10 years ago, I started tinkering with browsers, as a hobby.
6 years ago, I moved to California to continue doing this professionally.
4 years ago, I began working at Google, to expand my horizons and meet some great new people.
2 years ago, I moved into my house and take on my most significant non-work project to date.

In New Zealand until 1/9/09.

When talking about software, why do people say "You can do X with a single click" when it actually takes two or three clicks?

Hint: if it isn't on the app's main window, it's going to take more than one click to access it. Stop lying and instead learn to count.