I can only think about one thing at a time.

Any girl reading this just going to roll her eyes and think, “Of course. You’re a guy!”. But it’s not just true for me, it’s true for everyone. It’s true for you.

And not in that way.

At first, this claim can sound fantastic. We can talk on a cell phone while driving to work, and we can compose complex sentences while typing. But, if you stop to reflect on it, you can only do those things at the same time because at least one of them is automatic. In the first case driving is automatic, and in the second case typing is automatic. You’ve done them so often that you’ve habituated to them: doing them doesn’t require any thinking. Can you still talk on your cell phone while driving through a rainstorm on unfamiliar roads? Would you still be able to concentrate on writing if you had just switched to a Dvorak keyboard? I didn’t think so.

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The designers of the iPhone had an immense amount of courage. They finally removed the scrollbar, a persistent and harmful UI anachronism. Given the amount of time spent scrolling on computers, requiring the move from your locus of attention to the small target that scrollbars represents has wasted immense amounts of time. If you calculate it out conservatively, the scrollbar widget wastes almost one complete day a year. And that’s only if you scroll once every 6 minutes. Multiply that by number of the 300 million Firefox users and you’d find that the scrollbar wastes over three-fourths of a million man-years of web browser’s time. Every year.

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One of the design heuristics we use at Mozilla Labs, especially as we work to create a more invisible browser, is the “Over-the-Phone test”.

If your friends have ever got it into their heads that you might be good at technology, I’m sure you’ve found yourself trying to explain some aspect of computing over the phone. Probably something trivial and difficult to explain. I give you my condolences. Trying to troubleshoot a GUI over the phone is like giving driving directions to train conductor. (more…)