"Edit in Place" best practices

[Tim Thompson]

Does anyone know of usability studies for "Edit in Place" design patterns? I'm trying to determine which might be the best option of what I've seen on the Web and haven't established that there's any standard practice yet.

Here's what I've seen:
1) Yellow highlight Flickr-style "Edit in Place": Clicking on field triggers edit. Drawback: Users may not be aware they can edit the field by clicking on it.
2) Pencil (or other) icon: Clicking on icon triggers edit
3) [Edit] link: Clicking on link triggers edit. Drawback: Dirties up the design of the page.

Any studies on which works best for users or any which you prefer?

Thanks,
Tim

[Bruce Denham]

Yeah, I've seen the same techniques demonstrated in the book Designing Web Interfaces http://designingwebinterfaces.com/explore. Several best practices are mentioned, but no documented studies. There's always that trade-off between discoverability and visual clutter. And determining which way to lean will depend on the make-up of the target audience(s).

Best,
Bruce

[Tim Thompson]

Thanks. It's funny, I just got that book in the mail last night, and that was in the first chapter. They mentioned that the single input in-place edit was held out of the original YUI library release for precisely that reason (discoverability vs. visual clutter).

[Posty]

I've been working on what I like to call the slow double click. It's like when you try to rename a file in windows file explorer. The idea is that users will select the actor and then select it again for an edit. It has been recieving positive feedback so far.