Don't Click It... Or Else!

Here is an interesting site: http://www.dontclick.it/

The goal seems to be to educate us commoners on how ingrained clicking is to our navigation of the web. They do so by promoting and forcing navigation through “gestures” and by removing all click functionality from the site. For example, when I move my mouse over a link, the link is immediately activated.

I said it's interesting, but I hate this site. Here's why:

1. I'll give them that clicking is an ingrained behavior, but why does it need to change? If I change the way that web navigation works, doesn't that run contrary to all other user interfaces (i.e. Windows XP) that rely on click events? I see this like arguing that a steering wheel is a bad control mechanism for a car and we all need to start using joysticks when we drive.

2. From a user experience standpoint, it strikes me as a bad idea to tell a customer that their habits and behaviors are the problem and ask them to change. The key to creating a satisfactory user experience is to recognize that all web use is idiosyncratic and the best we can do is to cater to the 80% of our customers that expect to use our site a certain way. We should never seek to force our customers into a set of behaviors or ways of thinking.

3. I was careful NOT to click, but I accidentally did once after I finished reading something on the site and forgot where I was. After I clicked a link, the entire screen fuzzed as a TV with a bad signal would and I was presented with this message:

"Oops! You accidentally clicked even though there isn't anything to click."

I was forced to stare at this screen while a 10 second countdown clicked away before I was returned to the main interface.

While I appreciate the pavlovian attempt to slap the clicks out of me, I shuddered to think about what a casual user would think about such a thing. I can guess that most casual users would shut the browser down before the countdown had clicked off 5 seconds.

4. It's not practical. If you want to sell me on a different way of navigating a site, do it practically. Put up a pseudo storefront for me to browse products. Show me how easy it would be to add items to my shopping cart. Make me fill out a form so I can see that the "no click" interface makes that simpler. All I got from this site was 5 minutes wasted and something to rant about.

5. It's gimmicky and silly. But hey, they got my attention...