Superficial Intelligence

I love Google Reader. I am subscribed to approximately 60 feeds on it and log in a few times per day. But there is one thing about the interface that really bugs me. It is the fact that the "Mark all as read" button is right next to the "Refresh" button. I have found myself (in more than one occasion) clicking accidentally on "Mark all as read" when I really just wanted to refresh the page. Even worse, there is no "Undo" button. So all the items that I was saving up to read later by leaving them unread are suddenly marked as read and lost in between the hundreds of other items. There are two solutions to this problem: either separate the "Mark all as read" button from the "Refresh" button by a considerable amount of space (the easy option) or implement an undo function (the hard, but ultimately more useful, option).

I wonder why Google hasn't stumbled into this usability problem. Maybe they did their user tests with users who had a small number of registered feeds and therefore weren't affected by this as much? Or maybe they are considering us regular users their test users? Nevertheless, I just wish that they fix that soon.