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Comment by mcbishop | Hacker News Reader

I love the UX-design book: Don't Make Me Think.

There's an idea in this book, that when using a mouse, smaller buttons are harder to click because you need to stop the cursor inside its hitbox, but moving the cursor to the edge of the screen is easy because it's effectively a huge button whose height is infinite (or infinite width for lateral edges). And hitting a corner is even easier because it effectively has both infinite width and height!

This means that if there is an actual, finite button on a corner, the easiest way to click it is to position the cursor on the very corner, rather than attempting to position the cursor in the middle. But this is ruined if this button has padding. So for example, the start button on windows at the bottom left corner had padding in earlier versions of windows like windows 98, but the actual hitbox of the button shouldn't have padding, so that it's easier to click.

This is all to say that I use Firefox maximized, without a titlebar or menubar, so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen, and the hamburguer button is at the top right corner. But those buttons have padding! If I actually move the mouse to the very corner before clicking, I miss the button

That shit is infuriating

> There's an idea in this book, that when using a mouse, smaller buttons are harder to click

That would be Fitt’s law, which - if you can believe it - dates back to 1954!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

Padding is typically part of the hitbox, margin is not. What you are describing sounds like margin to me. Especially for Firefox since their UI is made with web tech.

But besides being overly pedantic I agree with your general point. If their is a small gap between hitbox and edge of the screen it is very annoying.

But the worst thing IMO is Windows 11 windows which you can grab by the titlebar but not the content area. However often there is no visual indication of where the titlebar starts/stops.

Also, more than 90% of the title bar are active UI elements like menus and close buttons, and you have to guess which few pixels are actually inert enough to allow dragging.

Note I am not talking about the title bar (it's hidden here), I am talking about the bar where the address bar is (also back/forward/reload buttons and extension buttons)

>so that the "back" button is at the top left corner of the screen

"Back" is used so frequently that I consider any mouse lacking a side button for "back" to be incomplete. You don't need to put a high value on your time for upgrading your mouse to pay for itself within its service life.

On the other end of that spectrum I cannot _stand_ back button on the mouse and always disable the feature immediately because it is often too easy for me to click those fiddly side buttons without meaning to (either while grabbing or while re-adjusting my hand position on the mouse)

So I usually only map middle click to such a button, as that button is at least 90% of the time relatively safe to accidentally trigger.

Middle mouse button is often mapped to "paste selection", which is dangerous to accidentally trigger. If the side buttons on a mouse are easy to trigger by accident it means they're positioned wrong. My mouse is shaped so that my thumb naturally rests slightly below the side buttons, and I have to raise it slightly to press them.

Fixing this would require whole-system thinking. The corners of a window are nothing special. The corners of a screen are special, and exploiting that requires thinking about the screen, even though as an application developer, your responsibility stops at the window.

Steve Krug's other book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, got me into usability tests with real users, and how to get it in place in a corporate environment. It's shocking to watch real users use software.

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