Two almost entirely unrelated things that teach a lesson about usability
Thing the first:
I’ve been playing Left4Dead recently. One of the zombie types is the “smoker”, which shoots out a long tongue that ensnares one of the survivors and drags them away from the group.
Take a look at this approximation of what happens, in cute Valentine’s Day form:
So when I was playing the other day, I was surprised to learn that you can actually save a survivor being dragged by using your melee attack. Somehow, in the magical zombie-infested world of Left4Dead, slapping someone upside the head with the butt of your automatic shotgun will unravel a mutated tongue wrapped around their neck. I’ve been playing the game for several weeks, and I’d never heard this before, but lo and behold it works.
And it makes no sense.
Thing the second:
The other day I signed up for an account at Mint.com. I put in my bank info, and it went and retrieved my balance sheet from Bank of America using magical Internet technology somehow. It worked pretty good, except for one thing: for some reason it categorized ATM withdrawals as mortgage payments.
So I dive in and try to fix the problem. For each transaction, Mint.com has a list of dozens of categories you can select from. But for some reason, I couldn’t find ATM Withdrawals anywhere on the list. I knew it existed, because a friend I was talking to told me as much, but where was it? Turns out, the category “ATM Withdrawals” is a sub-category of “Uncategorized.”
And that makes no sense, either.
Lesson learned:
Maybe I’m some kind of freak, but if I think that something’s not going to work, I don’t even try it.
For example, in Left4Dead, since whacking a fellow survivor with your melee attack is something to be generally avoided, and since there’s no possible way that could (in real life at least) uncoil a choking snakelike tongue, it never occurred to me to try it.
Similarly, when looking for a category named “ATM Withdrawal” it would never have occurred to me, in a million years, to check underneath the menu item called “Uncategorized.”
In short: things are easier to use when they make sense. Make sense.
You can shoot the tongue, too.
And you can melee the tongue.
Point of fact, I did figure that out on my own because it does make sense to me – you’re not hitting the survivor on the head, you’re hitting the tongue. Obviously you can hit anywhere NEAR the person and it’ll work, because if Valve required you to hit in exactly the right spot it’d be quite harder, and very tough to do when being humped by zombies.
It’s the catch-all ability of the ‘e’ button.
*well, like the ‘e’ button. Right-click is what I meant.