Blogger.com - Severe failure of user interface
So I’m currently in the process of writing a well thought out, edited blog post on a freinds blog. He kindly gave me access to his blog on blogger.com where I could edit the post inline. Quite a gift of trust, given the spelling, grammer and general professionalism of my own blog.
Today I was looking at the blog, trying to read for spelling mistakes, grammer issues and any final touches, and I figured that the easiest way to check these things was to print it out. So as is my natural keyboard loving wont, I pressed Ctrl-P in firefox to bring up the print dialog.
Except when you are at blogger.com, Ctrl-P doesn’t bring up the print dialog, it publishes the damn post.
Now suffice to say, I had a brown trouser moment desperately trying to work the controls on blogger to unpublish a post (I set the publish date to the future, which seems to have worked). But this should never have happened. Ctrl-P is such a known keypress, it’s a basic facet of our computing user interface. To redefine it to do a destructive behaviour is an epic failure on the designers part.
For those who don’t know, the following keypresses have been in use for so long that they have become ingrained in their users. If you are writing an application, you should never override what these do unless you really know what you are doing;
Ctrl-P means Print
Ctrl-S means Save
Ctrl-X means Cut text
Ctrl-C means Copy text
Ctrl-V means Paste text
If you suport undo and redo operations;
Ctrl-Z means undo
Ctrl-Y means redo