Stop Helping Me
I recently had the misfortune of visiting a site whose owner really wanted to help me.
Specifically, the site in question had some clever server-side scripting in place: If you came to any page of the site through a Google search result, all instances of the words you used in your search would be highlighted. I suppose the site owner thought he was doing me a favor by highlighting the information I was likely to be interested in.
As it turned out, there were a couple problems with this approach. The first was that the highlighting process was extremely “dumb”, and would highlight any sequence of characters that matched one of your search terms, even if it was in the middle of a completely different word. The second was that the “highlight” consisted not only of putting a colored background under the term, but also surrounding it with an enormous chunky border and gratuitous amounts of extra padding. This was already pretty annoying, but hang on, it gets better.
People say I’m crazy, but when I search for things, my searches are often in the form of legitimate sentence fragments (e.g. “how to stew a rhinoceros”) instead of a jumble of desired terms. It’s just easier, mentally, for me to search this way, and the extra typing rarely takes more than half a second. You’ll note, however, that these searches may include words like ”a” and “to” which are entirely irrelevant to the actual search. For the most part, Google will ignore these. The aforementioned overly-helpful web site, unfortunately, did not.
You can guess what happened next: Since one of my search terms was “a“, every single instance of the letter “a” on the entire web page was highlighted. The actual content of the page was lost amid a field of chunky highlights that couldn’t be disabled.
This “feature” is especially useless when you consider the fact that all of the current most-used web browsers have an incremental search feature that can also highlight all instances of the search term. If you’re really dead-set on letting users highlight all of their search terms at once, at least have the sensibility to A) leave the feature turned off by default for people who just want to read the page they found, B) not highlight terms when their characters appear in the middle of a different word, and C) not highlight words like “the” or “a” unless they are part of a quoted phrase. This doesn’t even require much coding effort, and is basically common sense.
The moral of the story (and this really applies to anything): Think through the usability implications before you add what you think will be a “helpful” feature. More often than not, a simple or naïve implementation is also the least user-friendly implementation.