Undoing the Job Justifying Efforts of UX Kids

If you’re a UX designer on a mature project, you have to justify your pay somehow – design refreshes become a requirement.  If tool companies had UX designers on staff, hammers would look like porcupines.

One of the most annoying features of FireFox V34 was the pop-down search menu.  Nice concept, but if your mouse drifts, you end up searching on twitter or amazon or some other useless thing, or just calling up the idiotic “add search options” dialog.  Srsly.  The search bar is a nice thing, thank you, leave it be.

Fortunately, FF offers a way to undo most of the horrible changes visited on the UI and you can keep it functional and efficient by undoing the damage that treating a program like a fashion plate rather than a tool has wrought.  Classic Theme Restorer is a good example.

Fixing the drop down search menu barf is easy: enter “about:config” in the URL bar and search for “browser.search.showOneOffButtons”  Set the value to “False” and stop being delayed by random search destinations.

Dear dev teams: your first responsibility is to the users who have adopted your product.  If you want to change the use case, fork.