Consistency

Today I was forced to realised how much I reply on consistency when interacting with programs. I wanted to access the properties of a person in my address book in Mozilla Thunderbird. So I opened up the right-click menu and clicked on the bottom item in the menu, expecting that it would be properties. However, for some reason in this menu Properties is at the top of the menu and delete is at the bottom!

There may well be a good reason for this (if delete was at the top I suppose you could slip after right clicking and delete the person by accident), but it is clearly a big problem for experienced windows users who won't read the menu, and just click where they expect the button to be.

Fortunately I didn't actually lose my contact from the address book as Thunderbird has two address books, the "personal address book" from which I deleted my contact and one simply labelled "address book" which has everyone in - now that's a good way of avoiding stress caused by bad design. :)