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Just let me select text

aartaka.me

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Re: Just let me select text

#501

Post by sbuttgereit »

gdwatson wrote: post #137
sbuttgereit wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A case can be made for graphic like elements like buttons, but for text: treat it like text even if it's clickable. In the Web version of Outlook, there are regularly times where the location of an appointment is a street address. That text is typically clickable. But the click action doesn't correspond to the choice of mapping service I might want to use in any one instance or to the fact that I might have other act…

The point isn't that the developer should disable text selection whenever he thinks it's unnecessary, which would indeed be silly. It's that sometimes the user interface rules for navigating selectable text conflict or interfere with the user interface rules for navigating, say, a set of tab panes. In that situation, making the tab titles selectable will cause grief. I agree with your address example. That is user da…

I don't think we disagree, too much. tab panes matches the "button" example.

However, I am sympathetic to those arguing translation. Sometimes I'll visit Japanese or Chinese websites. With some frequency, even if most of the site has an English edition, I'll find some UI element not translated, including buttons and the like... OK I think it was the commenter that I responded to, in a different reply said... just Google it if it's a single word. Great! But I don't even know where to begin to get the right characters from my old fashioned US keyboard. So now I have to Google for how to use my keyboard to get the characters I want, which also may need pre-requisite knowledge of the language I'm trying to translate (radicals and all that jazz)... that's a heavier lift than may be anticipated and where a simple copy/paste into an appropriate translator would make things much, much easier.

I would suggest this: make everything buttons, links, tabs, etc. selectable and copyable unless there is a real explicit and compelling reason to do otherwise. Now to be fair, I'm old enough to have been "online" in some fashion or another since before general public internet access availability was a thing... so my expectations for butter-like user experiences are low and my desire to do any damn thing I want high... but even today, there are probably still more websites which don't stop you from copying anything than there are searching for that polished experience where only the right things can be selected. The discontinuity and the deviation from the expectation that I can copy anything I also find as something which diminishes the user experience, even if occasionally I'm annoyed by over selecting things.

Re: Just let me select text

#502

Post by kuekacang »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #492
kuekacang wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day I requested chrome feature "copy text" in addition to "copy link" on context menu. Now I tried it it's no longer there.

It's not? Just checked a Chrome instance I had handy, it has all three options in the context menu - "Copy", "Copy link address" and "Copy link to highlight". First one copies text in between ... , second one copies the href attribute, and third one copies the link to page you're on with that weird URL framgment-based arbitrary text anchor/highlight scheme. All three work on Google search results for me.

Maybe weird behavior on my end? Or perhaps you need to select part of 's content to trigger it?

Re: Just let me select text

#503

Post by kuekacang »

p1mrx wrote: post #246
kuekacang wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've been considering simple click-to-copy button is a bad ux since it can destroy one's clipboard (granted, I'm not using clipboard manager). This might be mitigated with a confirmation before actually replacing the clipboard, but I haven't encountered such implementation. Maybe due to ctc more often appear in tech-related websites.

Instead of click-to-copy, you could do click-to-highlight, so that "right-click > Copy" highlights the text on right-click if it's not initially selected. There is some subtlety in the logic, because it shouldn't interfere when the user manually selects a substring. For a demo of click-to-highlight, install IPvFoo and use your mouse in the popup window. See the 'selectWholeAddress' function in https://github.com/pmar…

I'm aware of that gesture, but I think it shows the point that it requires extra intention from the user to do select+copy on an input-looking field with copy button attached, instead of being part if the default ctc button experience.

Not that I am searching, but I wonder if there's already tog/nielson/other ux research on this specific interaction.

Re: Just let me select text

#504

Post by kuekacang »

mintplant wrote: post #226
kuekacang wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've been considering simple click-to-copy button is a bad ux since it can destroy one's clipboard (granted, I'm not using clipboard manager). This might be mitigated with a confirmation before actually replacing the clipboard, but I haven't encountered such implementation. Maybe due to ctc more often appear in tech-related websites.

I highly recommend getting a clipboard manager! They keep a (usually configurable) history of your most recent clipboard items and allow switching the active selection between them.

Surely. First time I used clipboard management was long time ago somewhen in windows xp era. But growing older make me not really incentivized on trying myself to relearn clipboard history gestures. I might do that someday though.

The difference is now I know git and text editor with hot-save support; with mostly textual clipboard, the texts usually just land in either git/editor.

Re: Just let me select text

#505

Post by mc3301 »

catapart wrote: post #21

As a web dev, I fully agree with this, but with a huge exception: clickable text. Anything that is meant to be read as content should absolutely, without fail, be selectable and copyable (assuming appropriate permissions). But stuff like tab headers, buttons, or even text-sparse tiles - things meant for the user to click on - can, and usually should , prevent text selection. It is super annoying to be clicking back a…

There are often button which do important things, I want to double check the meaning of before clicking them. Selecting the text to copy/paste into a translator is absolutely beneficial.

And in Japan, the general layout of the "Go back to previous screen" and "confirm and continue" (left and right, respectively), is reversed from what English readers might be used to.

So if I can't select the text... I open up a hand-drawing-chinese-characters app and slowly draw out each character? I'd rather be able to select the text.

Note: unfortunately, so many button in Japanese UIs are actually .png files. I know this from experience of using and building apps and websites here.

Re: Just let me select text

#506

Post by mc3301 »

lupire wrote: post #294
Hobadee wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real-world example I use nearly daily: Selecting the nav header that's the ticket number in our ticketing system. I copy-paste the number elsewhere. Of course there are many other bad design decisions that go into requiring me to do this, but it's still a real example of why all text should be selectable.

My company has dedicated years of engineering time to add custom "copy" buttons next to text that they spent months to make non-selectable.

I chuckled. I reflected on the hours having done metaphorically similar in developing apps.

Re: Just let me select text

#507

Post by mc3301 »

3036e4 wrote: post #52

Teams refused to let me copy text from the real-time captions, even showing a popup to say it wasn't allowed. But after the meeting in the posted transcript I could copy the same text anyway so not sure why it was so important to prevent me from copying immediately. Very annoying since I wanted that text right then and not later.

Zoom is the exact same. So frustrating, especially when dealing with multiple languages.

Re: Just let me select text

#508

Post by array_key_first »

rustystump wrote: post #315
whstl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% disagree. Not everyone is fluent in every language, and not every website works perfectly with the browser's translator. There will be situations where people will want to translate that ONE word that is actually in a button or tab, and isn't selectable because someone thought they knew better.

This sounds perhaps a bit rude but it isnt possible to optimize for every possible use case someone somewhere may have. At the end of the day, a line has to be drawn.

You don't have to optimize anything, in fact you do the opposite of optimization.

Not making text selectable is extra work. You have to go out of your way to do that. That's the optimization, not the other way around.

If you just do things the way the web expects you will be shocked how much stuff magically works.

The back button too? Yeah, you don't need logic for that. That should just work right off the rip.

Re: Just let me select text

#510

Post by NetMageSCW »

tredre3 wrote: post #256
bambax wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the joke is moot, because on the web, you can't really make text non-selectable (you can try, but it can be defeated extremely easily). In an app, undoing that is pretty much impossible (or at least, above my pay grade). This is one of a million reasons why apps are so bad.

> In an app, undoing that is pretty much impossible (or at least, above my pay grade). In my experience it is above the average user's pay grade to work around it in a browser too. Even power users will probably give up if the usual ways don't work out (holding alt, browser extension, reader mode). The power-est of users might glimpse at the inspector, but they'll give up if the nodes are obfuscated. All this to say…

It was pretty easy to get a Bookmarklet from Google and add it to my iPhone Safari and use it.
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