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If you have a configuration option, then it may ship with the "wrong" behavior, but once the user finds this option and switches it, they never need to think ab

If you have a configuration option, then it may ship with the "wrong" behavior, but once the user finds this option and switches it, they never need to think about it again. (Unless they are in an environment where they regularly need to interact with other people's machines. Which can be solved; when I worked in an animation studio we had a standard set of key shortcuts for things that Flash didn't assign keys to out of the box so that a director could hop onto anyone's computer to edit a scene and be confident that, for instance, slamming numpad-0 would get them the very frequently used Free Transform tool.) (The user may also have to think about it again when a new release comes up with an exciting new way to be "wrong"; if a prefs switch was not provided along with this new behavior then the result will be a new top-voted bug on the public bug/feature tracker, and people reverting to the previous version until the .1 release that grudgingly adds a switch. Or swearing a lot and deciding it's time to have a look at the competition if rolling back to the previous release isn't an option.)

tialaramex 4y ago
> it may ship with the "wrong" behavior, but once the user finds this option and switches it, they never need to think about it again. The other behaviour is also wrong. That's the whole point.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Exactly, they're all wrong to someone. There is no One True Way, even if the people maintaining the program are dedicated enough to the way they like to eliminate all the ways they think is "wrong", and hope their userbase has a big enough sunk cost that they will put up with it instead of leaving for a competitor that lets them keep doing it the "wrong" way. This is why I put quotes around "wrong" throughout my comment. :)
  - tialaramex 4y ago
    No, you're still not getting it. It's not about personalization, they're all wrong sometimes to everybody. I used the window focus example assuming people know what I'm talking about but maybe that's now too obscure (which makes me feel old) so I'll explain it more carefully. The correct window focus behaviour is called "Focus follows brain". Here's how it works, it's pretty simple: When you press a key, the window you were intending the keypress for reacts to that keypress and no other windows. That's all. This isn't achievable because it involves mind reading, some sophisticated realtime brain scanning might be tried, but chances are this will reveal what you were looking at, and we know sometimes people do not intend the focus to be what they were looking at so that technology is too primitive, we need mind reading. The most common focus behaviour today is called "Click to focus". This lands the onus on the user, whichever window you last clicked on has focus. Sometimes you will realise you "forgot to click" but that's really a symptom of the bad focus. An alternative is "Focus follows mouse" in which the window focus goes wherever the mouse cursor is. This can feel better, since you're not clicking on stuff just to give it focus, but it will still get tripped up (and it's even more confusing for people who've learned "Click to focus") in many cases or various "Lazy focus" rules which make exceptions for windows that can't do keyboard input and so logically wouldn't ever be your intended focus. In each case you will sometimes be disappointed even if you are "smart" enough to blame yourself for this happening. None of these deliver what users want, which is "Focus follows brain". We do not have any way to achieve this.
    - egypturnash 4y ago
      Mouse focus may be a special case of this (though I can't say I've ever really had any problems with typing into the wrong window on a click-to-focus Mac, with the rare exception of a program asking me to delete it by unexpectedly popping up a window and stealing focus), but I thought this was just one example of many UI decisions where there are multiple ways to do it, and all of them are arguably "wrong" from the standpoint of different people who are used to different things. Zoom behavior in art programs, for instance, is what started this thread: "zoom to cursor", "zoom to selected object", and "zoom to center of screen" are all things I've seen in various art tools, and all of them are "wrong" if they're not what you're used to, and extra-"wrong" if a program suddenly changes what it's doing because "implemented fabulous new zoom behavior" made a nice bullet point on an engineer's employment history.

tialaramex 4y ago

> it may ship with the "wrong" behavior, but once the user finds this option and switches it, they never need to think about it again. The other behaviour is also wrong. That's the whole point.

egypturnash 4y ago
Exactly, they're all wrong to someone. There is no One True Way, even if the people maintaining the program are dedicated enough to the way they like to eliminate all the ways they think is "wrong", and hope their userbase has a big enough sunk cost that they will put up with it instead of leaving for a competitor that lets them keep doing it the "wrong" way. This is why I put quotes around "wrong" throughout my comment. :)
- tialaramex 4y ago
  No, you're still not getting it. It's not about personalization, they're all wrong sometimes to everybody. I used the window focus example assuming people know what I'm talking about but maybe that's now too obscure (which makes me feel old) so I'll explain it more carefully. The correct window focus behaviour is called "Focus follows brain". Here's how it works, it's pretty simple: When you press a key, the window you were intending the keypress for reacts to that keypress and no other windows. That's all. This isn't achievable because it involves mind reading, some sophisticated realtime brain scanning might be tried, but chances are this will reveal what you were looking at, and we know sometimes people do not intend the focus to be what they were looking at so that technology is too primitive, we need mind reading. The most common focus behaviour today is called "Click to focus". This lands the onus on the user, whichever window you last clicked on has focus. Sometimes you will realise you "forgot to click" but that's really a symptom of the bad focus. An alternative is "Focus follows mouse" in which the window focus goes wherever the mouse cursor is. This can feel better, since you're not clicking on stuff just to give it focus, but it will still get tripped up (and it's even more confusing for people who've learned "Click to focus") in many cases or various "Lazy focus" rules which make exceptions for windows that can't do keyboard input and so logically wouldn't ever be your intended focus. In each case you will sometimes be disappointed even if you are "smart" enough to blame yourself for this happening. None of these deliver what users want, which is "Focus follows brain". We do not have any way to achieve this.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    Mouse focus may be a special case of this (though I can't say I've ever really had any problems with typing into the wrong window on a click-to-focus Mac, with the rare exception of a program asking me to delete it by unexpectedly popping up a window and stealing focus), but I thought this was just one example of many UI decisions where there are multiple ways to do it, and all of them are arguably "wrong" from the standpoint of different people who are used to different things. Zoom behavior in art programs, for instance, is what started this thread: "zoom to cursor", "zoom to selected object", and "zoom to center of screen" are all things I've seen in various art tools, and all of them are "wrong" if they're not what you're used to, and extra-"wrong" if a program suddenly changes what it's doing because "implemented fabulous new zoom behavior" made a nice bullet point on an engineer's employment history.