There should be an intuitive way to permanently ban a site from becoming a Top Site in Apple Safari 4.0.

The design: My favorite feature of Apple Safari 4.0 is Top Sites, where the user can select from a grid of their most visited sites whenever they start Safari or open a new tab.

In this column, Redesigning the best, I consider systems with excellent user interfaces, and I try to determine how to improve one aspect of the user experience.

The problem: Common use cases exist wherein the user does not want certain pages to show up in their Top Sites. For instance, if the computer is used by multiple people, the user might want to extend the courtesy of not filling up Top Sites with pages that would not be used by anyone else.

My redesign: In Mac OSX, holding down the alt key changes options of certain menus; for example, if you right-click an application on the dock and hold the alt key, Quit changes to Force Quit. Apple should extend this design pattern to Safari’s Top Sites. When the user holds the alt key in edit mode, the X above each site should visually change (e.g., to a red circle with a line through it) to signify that the site would be permanently banned upon clicking. Although this redesign would not have an initial visual appearence, it would utilize a common keyboard shortcut, thus being intuitive for the power users who would be most likely to use the feature.

What do you think? Let me know.