Google Chrome: Bringing Fitts's Law To You
Google has always had decent UX practices, notwithstanding their complete lack of Android UX guidelines before 4.0 and the occasional dubious Doodle. Tabbed browsing can suck sometimes (and I’ve tried to make it suck less before), but this feature of Chrome has always made me happy:
This image shows me in the middle of closing a bunch of tabs in Chrome by clicking the “close” button on one of the tabs on the left. Notice a few things:
-
Generally when you close tabs, they will either resize 1) uniformly to a predetermined “natural” size or 2) to fill the tab bar, whichever property is satisfied first.
-
Here though, the tabs are not resizing, or else they would have been resized to fill the tab bar (note the empty space on the right, indicating they’re being forced to not resize)
-
This makes it easier for the user to close the tabs: I don’t have to keep moving my mouse to hit another “close” button. I would be chasing “close” buttons if the tabs kept resizing.
This in and of itself is already pretty cool. But notice how I’ve always been clicking “close” on the 4th tab from the left. What happens when there are, say, 3 tabs left? Because the tabs aren’t resizing, my cursor would no longer be over a “close” button.
Should the width of the tabs stay consistent until I indicate I’m done clicking “close” buttons? Since I’m no longer hovering over a “close” button, should the tabs go with option 1 above and reset to their “natural” sizes? No. What Chrome does here is downright genius:
The tabs start resizing, but they resize so that the “close” button of a tab stops just under my mouse cursor—ready to be clicked. I can keep clicking to close more tabs without moving my mouse at all. Note the difference between the image above and the one below, where I moved my cursor and caused the tabs to resize to their “natural” sizes.
To paraphrase Fitts’s Law, the further away a target is, the longer time it will take to acquire and act upon that target, and the more frustrated your users become. If you think about it, Google here is actually bringing Fitts’s Law to you. Instead of you moving your mouse to acquire a target, the target comes to you.
There’s an awful “In Soviet Russia” joke in here somewhere.
†In their defense though, Firefox for OS X does seem to behave this way as well. However, this "resizing to the cursor" feature seems to be missing in some other favorite apps with tabs, such as Safari, Sublime Text 2, and Terminal (well, it's not that I have that many tabs open... I just have really small Terminal windows sometimes).