expletive inserted

I noticed this Sunday while reading the New York Times online that when you are in the main text of an article, double-clicking anywhere on the body of the article causes a pop-up window to spawn. The pop-up contains a dictionary definition of the word that has been highlighted by your double-click action. This is awful design, and given The Times’ previously positive track record designing well thought out user interactions on their web site, I am a little surprised at them for letting this bubble its way into production.

1) There is no indication to the user that double-clicking a word will spawn a pop-up. Standard behavior for non-hyperlinked text in a HTML document when double-clicked is to highlight the closest recognizable word based on some application or operating system defined word boundaries. Don’t screw with my expectations and plague me with pop-up windows defining the word “in” or “military”.

2) I (as others do I bet) generally double-click at seemingly random places on the document when reading long articles to mark a spot I have read up to in case I need to leave my desk or switch focus away from the web browser for a moment to take care of something else. You have made my preferred, efficient way of reading online articles into a behavior I have to actively think about not doing. Thanks a lot.

3) Taking a look at the script itself, http://graphics.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js, we can see from the comments that this is a “beta” version. The question that then begs to be asked is, what the hell is this beta code doing on your live, production web site besides pissing people like me off? You should at the very least have some way for jerks like me to turn this feature off.

Since the ability to turn off this modified double-clicking behavior is missing from nytimes.com, I’d recommend everyone go out and get Adblock Plus for Firefox and make sure that

http://*.nytimes.com/js/common/screen/altClickToSearch.js

is in your blocklist.

Uck. I generally don’t condone the use of ad blocking software because I do realize that web sites need to monetize themselves somehow, and right now advertising is one of the most accepted and used methods of doing this, but please, just stop messing with the years of expectations I’ve built about how plain text on a web site should react to my actions. Grr.