(Double) Clicking to Creative Destruction

The other day Anna posed a question to me: “why do we not ‘double click’ much anymore with our mouse?”  It’s a good question.  When was the last time that you double clicked on something?  Or, to be more exact, when was the last time you double clicked on something other than to open up a file in Explorer or the Finder?

Opening files is just about the only thing that still takes a double click.  It used to be all over the place: to open the program, then to open the file, then to do something in the program.  So much so that double clicking is still a part of our mouse “vocabulary.”  Watch a user when something isn’t responding to their input; they will click, click again, right click, double click, click, double click.  It’s as if double clicking is expected to do something that single clicking doesn’t.

In today’s computer interfaces, that’s almost a laughable idea.  Why would anyone create something that you had to click on twice?  But in the past, the whole point of double clicking was to expand our vocabulary.  You would click on the icon once to select it, click and drag to move it, and double click to open it.

My first answer to Anna’s question didn’t take long to think of: the Internet.  The rise of the internet is probably the biggest single factor in the death of the double click.  But, as I realized upon further reflection, it’s not the only factor.  The double click was doomed from the moment it was created because it is an inherently artificial interaction.  This artificiality causes several major problems.

1. It’s unintuitive. The ideal computer interactions mimic “real life.”  Say you walk up to a table with an object on it that you want to manipulate.  You might touch the object.  You might touch and push the object.  Or you might pick it up and examine it.  Touching is like clicking it, and pushing like clicking and dragging.  But there is no way to “pick up” an object on the computer—so double clicking was invented to translate that portion of our physical vocabulary into a digital action.

The problem is that double clicking feels odd to us.  Because you would never double click on a physical object—the equivalent of tapping it twice in rapid succession and expecting something to happen—it does not make sense to our brains to double click on the computer.  Thus, from the very beginning, the double click had limited applicability.

2. It’s hard to use. I have most frequently observed this problem when watching elderly people use computers.  Even when they have been trained to double click instead of single click (see point one), they often simply cannot double click fast enough because of arthritis or other hand problems.  This isn’t limited to old people, though.  It’s not uncommon for me to find myself wondering whether my double click “caught” or whether I should do it again.  Single clicking is easy—as long as you know your mouse is in the right place you can hear the click of the button and rest assured that you have performed an action.  But with the double click you have to not only hear two clicks, but also judge the time between them to make sure you didn’t click too slowly.

Which brings us to the Internet. Double clicking has never been a part of the Internet vocabulary, but the Internet has become a huge part of our computer vocabulary—probably the dominant portion for many of us.  The World Wide Web is undoubtedly far different from what Tim Berners-Lee originally envisioned it would be.  But some ideas have persisted from nearly the very beginning; among them, the idea of clicking on a link.

Hyperlinks were designed to get you from one page on the Internet to another with as little fuss as possible.  For many years they were the primary method of interacting with web pages.  Even the advent of HTML forms didn’t change much until AJAX came around.  With hyperlinks there is no need for a double click, a single click suffices.  So the primary user interaction of the Internet finds double clicking unnesecary.

This legacy has carried over into the Web 2.0, but websites also do much more these days than simply let you click on links.  Take any of the major websites Web 2.0—GMail, Flickr, Google Maps—and think about your interactions.  There’s a lot of dragging, scrolling, and sliding going on.  These motions all avoid the two problems mentioned above; they are fairly intuitive, all being based on actual actions in life, and they are relatively easy to do.

Web applications are now, for most people, the primary applications we use our computers for.  Email, RSS feeds, blog posting, online finances, maps: all through websites.  Now that the most common computer tasks are in a medium that doesn’t require the double click, the double click is no longer common.

Thus, in a certain way the Internet did “kill” the double click.  But it is more the inherent artificiality of the interaction that is the real “killer.”   The double click would have gone away eventually, maybe not entirely, but mostly.  The process was sped up considerably, however, by the fact that the Internet, which had no history of double clicking to hold it back, took over our computer lives at the same time that alternative interactions were being invented.