Link: User Annoyance
By Eddie Lopez. Monday, 26. March 2007, 18:04:25
Jakob Nielson brings up one of my pet peeves with using scroll wheels on forms in his latest Alertbox (although I just tried this with Opera, Safari and IE7 and didn't reproduce this- did we solve this problem already?):
I hate it when your browser's focus is still on the select box, but your focus is on the page and you start scrolling the wheel to move down the page and you change your selection instead.
I don't know if I've set up my browser to not do that, or if the current generation of browsers all solved this problem- but I still feel the caution when I'm using a select box- I consciously click back onto the page to focus it instead of the select box before moving on.
Sites offer drop-downs for state abbreviations under the theory that doing so prevents input errors. But that's not true: menus are more error prone than typing because the mouse scroll wheel often makes users inadvertently change the state field's content after they've moved their gaze elsewhere on the screen. In contrast, everybody knows how to type their own state's two letters, and it's always faster to enter this information through the keyboard than the mouse.
I hate it when your browser's focus is still on the select box, but your focus is on the page and you start scrolling the wheel to move down the page and you change your selection instead.
I don't know if I've set up my browser to not do that, or if the current generation of browsers all solved this problem- but I still feel the caution when I'm using a select box- I consciously click back onto the page to focus it instead of the select box before moving on.
WIDGETIZE
Anonymous # 27. March 2007, 10:43
After being annoyed by this mouse wheel focus issue ever since my first experience of mouse wheels in 2001, I've finally written my own mouse hook program that passes wheel messages to the control that the cursor is over, rather than the focused control.
It's amazing how much better it works; it should always have been this way.
Anonymous # 1. May 2007, 14:45
A little bit of JavaScript that takes notice of when the mouse moves off the drop down and unfocuses (blurs) the drop-down could help prevent this problem. This idea would have to be tested of course to make sure that it isn't adding announce to the fact the field is being de-selected.