"Nobody's going to try to do that"

Someday I'll track down the quote that really describes this right. Something like:

If you try to anticipate how someone will use something, and design it specifically for that purpose, its general usefulness decreases.

It also means that if you design something just for what it is, then people will be able to use it in all the ways a designer didn't anticipate.

So here's my case study for today: working on a presentation that cites a bunch of articles. A typical word processor type task.

The fastest way to do the list of articles is to drag their titles in. Linked titles are no problem: drag 'em in and immediately they show up linked and unstyled. The unlinked ones in heading tags required some formatting and manual linking. I can deal with that.

But the folks who decided to use some sketchy "custom fonts using flash" solutions for this page had decided that having their font showing up exactly the same on all browsers was more important than it being copy-and-paste friendly. So theirs is the one title I have to re-type.

Now I remember getting into conversations with clients over this, back in the days of putting text in as an image. I'd say "people have to be able to copy and paste this." And every once in awhile, I'd hear "nobody is going to try to do that." Every time somebody decides that, they're actually setting a condition: "Anybody who tries to do that is going to be frustrated by our choices."

The more something submits to the user, the more it gets used. If the user has to submit to it, especially by doing extra work, it better not be for the sake of esthetics.