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A comment on Open Letter to sites with annoying interfaces.

Re:Open Letter to sites with annoying interfaces by po on Sunday December 25, 2011 @11:34PM (#3392212)
I have always called these interfaces 'scrubbing interfaces' and I believe it's a well known anti-pattern. It used to be popular with flash programming and design-heavy sites that didn't want all of those 'ugly controls'.

Here is my rule of thumb: avoid attaching functionality to the hover event. Visual effects/indications are fine.

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Re:Open Letter to sites with annoying interfaces by droithomme on Sunday December 25, 2011 @11:43PM (#3392226)
I agree. I hadn't heard that term. There's a related anti-pattern called Mystery Meat Navigation.

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/mysterymeatnavigation.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation

Mystery meat was weird looking inexplicable icons that you had to click to find what they do or hover to get a description. Sometimes, including in both those references, they extend it to be cases where the inexplicable icon doesn't even exist and a description is invisible until hover. The hover patter, what you call scrubbing, seems to me to be related to but different from mystery meat, which is characterized by seeing a navigation element and saying "What on earth is that supposed to be?"

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