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Originally Posted by RobTrew
I'm afraid that the "double-click" interpretation of that frequent cry of "where's my data" doesn't entirely convince me.
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We field a lot of tech support phone calls and email, and I can't think of a single recent instance of "Where's my data?" which didn't turn out to be from accidental focusing. Customers aren't sure what they're doing, but somehow they're ending up focused and while I can't prove anything I think it's far likely that they're double-clicking than that they're activating Focus by accident in some other way (such as Control-Command-F, or clicking on the Focus button on the toolbar which immediately changes to offer to Show All).
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The solution, it seems to me, is not to make zooming in harder but to make zooming out easier - to liberate it from complex keystrokes and the friction of the menu.
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I agree that zooming out should be much easier, and that was one of the goals of our built-in perspectives—which actually did help quite a bit, as noted above. Unfortunately, it didn't help with accidental focus.
I think we've already solved this problem with our iPad interface, where focusing is a much more explicit and visible action, and where the visual feedback of what you did and mechanism for getting back out is much more obvious. We're very much looking forward to bringing back the interface improvements from the iPad edition's 3rd-generation interface back to our Mac edition.
But we can't do that overnight, and in the meantime we still have a lot of people accidentally focusing without even realizing it or knowing how to avoid it. I'm pretty convinced that getting rid of this non-obvious double-click shortcut to the Focus feature would fix it, but another approach we could try would be to change the settings on the built-in perspectives to always reset your focus, so they could help people get back out when they accidentally focus. (However, I worry that would make focusing less useful for those of us who are intentionally using it, without really preventing the accidents that are causing confusion in the first place—it would just make it easier for them to recover from those accidents afterwards.)