--- title: "Death to the double-click (a lesson in design)" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/15/death-to-the-double-click-a-lesson-in-design.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/15/death-to-the-double-click-a-lesson-in-design.html" published: "2003-07-15T19:41:00" updated: "2003-07-15T19:41:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Why do today's mice still have \"Double Click\" functionality? In terms of interaction design - its one of the worst forms of design ever created; You have one button which does different things at different…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Death to the double-click (a lesson in design) By Roy Osherove July 15, 2003 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published July 15, 2003; technical details may be outdated. Why do today's mice still have "Double Click" functionality? In terms of interaction design - its one of the worst forms of design ever created; You have one button which does different things at different circumstances. **not only that**, but those circumstances are not easily comprehensible, they are more of the "touchy feely" kind and thus many people fail to use them correctly. The action of the button depends on how **fast** you can move your finger. How's that for "designed with human considerations"? It's one of the most annoying tasks to be performed by a human, and sometimes people just fail miserably at achieving this "simple" task. click too slowly and you'll start editing a file name, click too fast and you'll soon have a muscle cramps. Logitech first came out witha "revolutionary" software that allows one to configure one of their mouse buttons to be used as as "double click". You could make your thum double click on files etc. Microsoft soon followed. You even have various system properties that you can configure to set the desired length of time between single clicks in order for it to be considered a "double click". Why hasn't anyone come out with a mouse that has a built in double-click button? It shouldn't even be called "double click" . it should be callse the "**Activate"** button" or something. You won't need any software to configure the damn thing. Want to run a file? simply "activate" it with your thumb(or whatever the design). No settings, no nothing. Do you need special settings in order to work with the "click" or "right click" button on the mouse? no. Its obvious and so should "A**ctivate"** be. Get the hint, MSFT/Logitech? ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Jul 16, 2003 ### [Vs.Net for presentations](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/16/vsnet-for-presentations.html) - Jul 16, 2003 ### [PDC pricing continued](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/16/pdc-pricing-continued.html) - Jul 15, 2003 ### [Cheer up Jeff. You can get the job you want](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/15/cheer-up-jeff-you-can-get-the-job-you-want.html) - Jul 15, 2003 ### [New job](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/15/new-job.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/