Blending the chrome …
Applications like Google Chrome have led the Windows browser UI “resurrection” by blending the window boarder chrome and the application chrome together. (The visible graphical interface features of an application are sometimes referred to as "chrome")*.
Google Chrome 7.0b
Zune 4
I decided to write this post after spending a week using Internet Explorer 9 Beta. One thing most people notice is the cleaner UI, its very "Google Chrome like”. As the week went went on there was one area of interaction that didn’t jive well with me at all.
Most, if not all Windows users have discovered and learned that double-clicking on the window chrome maximizes/restores the the application window. I think it’s safe to say this works in 99% of all applications; so the question is: what do you users expect to happed when we start to blend the chrome together?
If a user has a pre-established, pre-learnt expectation between input and action, we have to be very delicate on how we change the UI around them. This doesn’t mean we should never change the behaviour of our UI to deliver better user experiences, but more importantly we need to ensure that the change is predictable and clearly understandable.
Internet Explorer 9 Beta: Your chrome is not only confusing, its extremely frustrating….
I’m confident that this is something that will change as the IE team gathers beta feedback, but I want to call this out as a general problem we may all face sometime or another. The chrome surrounding Internet Explorer may look simpler, but looks can be deceiving. The images below illustrates how each area of the chrome reacts to a users double-click:
Green: maximize or restore application window Red: close window Blue: open new tab
If it looks like a duck?
Even though IE’s glass chrome is clean and continuous from the end user’s perspective, its far from that under the covers. Two different outcomes occur when performing the same action on what seems to the end user to be the same control. If the tip of your mouse pointer falls 1px into the blue area (across an invisible boarder), then instead of maximizing the window when double clicking you create a new tab (which is super annoying). What I find even more puzzling is the fact that the area to the left and right of the application controls also maximizes the window (little green boxes). It seems like the design is “when double clicking: if it looks like the window chrome it acts like windows chrome, except in an area of fixed height and dynamic width beside the address bar”. But what confuses me even more is that when the user drags anywhere on the chrome (blue+green) it moves the window (taking the approach of “if it looks like window chrome it acts like window chrome all the time”).
To add temperament to my frustration, I use IE9 on a Windows Touch enabled device, so when your large and opaque finger is double tapping on what looks like a nice large open area of window chrome, its really two small areas and you have no confidence or predictability on what the outcome will be! Finger crossed for maximize!
I’m a firm believer when it comes to UX design that a single interaction should perform the same outcome when afforded by similar or congruent visuals.
Here’s hoping they fix this one!
Amish Patel
