John Fremlin's blog: Designing user interfaces to computer systems

It's hard to make a functional user interface and impossible to make one that delights everybody. Especially when designing a website there is a huge temptation to simply expose functionality in the easiest way possible. But this is backwards because probably a vast number of users will interact with the website and any unintuitive behaviour means they in the aggregate waste vast amounts of time.

Instead of exposing functionality in the easiest way, one should add expected behaviours — if the user presses the delete key, what should happen? If a user clicks on any part of the page, probably he or she some intent in mind and if one were watching, one could guess it. Guess ahead of time and add the behaviour! Each user action signifies an intent that it is unkind to ignore.