The way I think about it is that you assume a level of responsibility whenever you tinker with default affordances. Your "feature" isn't restricted to whatever narrow conception or intention you had when you designed it. It consists in the totality of a visitor's actual experience.
If I change the logic of the the back button, I'm changing what the back button affords on this particular website and become responsible for whatever happens as a result.
That includes confused and frustrated users saying "Screw you and your broken website."
Or take, e.g., the way scrollbars work, which can be very browser-and-OS-specific. Are you sure you want to assume responsibility for that? How sensitive are you to the downside, really?
Essentially, you're making your website speak a kind of creole. You've forgone any right to be upset if your visitors don't speak it and shouldn't be surprised if they persist in "misinterpreting" it.
Forget about avoiding such "features" because you want to be nice to your visitors. It always seemed to me they offer limited upside and unlimited downside.
Yep, this is exactly right. Websites benefit from design idioms that have been carefully crafted over many years. Every website that disregards these idioms makes itself harder to use because it doesn’t speak the same language as what the user is (perhaps without noticing) used to. I wrote about the loss of design idioms at length: https://loeber.substack.com/p/4-bring-back-idiomatic-design
The way I think about it is that you assume a level of responsibility whenever you tinker with default affordances. Your "feature" isn't restricted to whatever narrow conception or intention you had when you designed it. It consists in the totality of a visitor's actual experience.
If I change the logic of the the back button, I'm changing what the back button affords on this particular website and become responsible for whatever happens as a result.
That includes confused and frustrated users saying "Screw you and your broken website."
Or take, e.g., the way scrollbars work, which can be very browser-and-OS-specific. Are you sure you want to assume responsibility for that? How sensitive are you to the downside, really?
Essentially, you're making your website speak a kind of creole. You've forgone any right to be upset if your visitors don't speak it and shouldn't be surprised if they persist in "misinterpreting" it.
Forget about avoiding such "features" because you want to be nice to your visitors. It always seemed to me they offer limited upside and unlimited downside.