“This way, the interface does not get in the way.”

Ilya Birman on his blog talks about interfaces that unnecessarily slow people down, in a series of two posts. In the first one, titled “Let me click,” Birman shows a few places that force the user to go through a roundabout series of clicks, instead of taking a direct route: In Aegea’s comment settings, there is a “send by email” checkbox with an email-address field associated with it. If the checkbox is unchecked, there is no point filling in the field: the address is not needed for anything else. If the checkbox is checked while the address is blank, the system cannot send anything as it does not know the address. In short, these controls are interconnected. Logically you could disable the input altogether if the checkbox is unchecked — there is no point filling it in anyway. But that is irritating. What if I want to enter the address and then turn on the checkbox? It would be even worse not to let me turn off the checkbox when the address is filled in. I want to turn it off — let…