IMS_Blog

At first it seems obvious. Hitting enter should execute the command. Well, where does that idea come from? “Execute a command”?? The whole notion of enter performing the action originates in a command line culture, not something the average user thinks about (this is not to say the average user hasn’t become used to this convention—far from it, they are at time too used to it). The “because it should do” isn’t a particularly good argument when you start asking why.

Ahhh, yes, but from a usability point of view you want to quickly perform the action, without much hassle, by hitting the great big enter key. Except this is where the problems arise. The user hits that enter key without thinking (it’s well known that warning dialogues are virtually useless because the user automatically bypasses them without thinking after a while). Yet what if that action is fairly critical? Shouldn’t the user be given a moment to think about it, just in case they are making a mistake? Shouldn’t the cancel button be default? Think about it. Clicking OK (by hitting Enter) could have potentially devastating consequences, especially if it’s done “by accident”. The consequences of accidentally hsitting Cancel are only that the action has to be reinitialised. It might waste time, but not as much time as recovering from major data loss. Isn’t that better usability?

Of course the problem is that the instances where hitting Enter have severe and unwanted consequences are far out numbered by the instances where clicking OK is exactly what is wanted. The huge frustration of hitting Enter and then realising it was a very bad idea is lost in all the small frustrations of not being able to quickly get on with what you were doing because the stupid computer thinks your stupid and are making a mistake. The answer to this may depend on the severity of the task being performed. Perhaps deleting a file ought to have a default of OK but deleting and bypassing the trash should default to Cancel, giving the user a second chance because the really don’t want to get that wrong.

I’ve no doubt other, wiser minds have thought about this. I just can’t be bothered to Google for it at the moment. Perhaps some of them even came to roughly the same conclusion as me. It may be that the design mistakes of the past are no too ingrained to be correctable. OK and Enter seem forever linked, and the user will just have to live with it.