4 ms·

Ever since mouses and GUIs were invented it was common knowledge that "ordinary" users don't bother to learn keyboard shortcuts. That common knowledge is wrong

Ever since mouses and GUIs were invented it was common knowledge that "ordinary" users don't bother to learn keyboard shortcuts. That common knowledge is wrong, but it comes from an important truth: brand new users who are not yet committed to your product will get frustrated if the thing they need to do is hidden away as a key-binding or command-line command. So successful products optimise for the UX of a user who doesn't yet know how to use the product well. And such users really love touchscreens.

reificator 7y ago
But I wasn't talking about onboarding. I was talking about the speed of people using your software to do work on either a touchscreen or a keyboard.
- p_l 7y ago
  The decision makers in UI design often design for "someone ripped from plow by grenade", as the saying goes in Poland - someone who has no idea about the product at all. Others tend to follow this. All of that results in undiscoverable interfaces designed for first-time users and horrible for everything else, and thus cult of first mouse, now touchscreen.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  You weren’t even talking about that. The person you responded to wrote: > custom control board with specialized buttons and keyboard So we weren’t even talking about keyboard shortcuts in the ctrl-c sense, but that the specific action has a specific button. How, indeed, could that have been a surprise. Here’s a my stupid story: On the laser cutter I operate there as no way to tell the machine “the stock / remnant / offcut I want to cut the parts from is located at x,y”. The machine has a touch screen display which shows the cutting heads current location. So you put it in manual mode, drive the cutting head in to the start position as per your materials location, then type the coordinates it displays as a graphic in to two fields in a dialogue box. There’s no button on the machine or touch screen to automate that. This is why I think UX professionals will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Thankfully I’m aware of AutoHotKey, and Capture2Text, so I wrote a script to turn a keyboard shortcut in to a series of mousse movements, clicks, and OCR, to take the graphic display if numbers and turn them in to strings of numbers. I still can’t believe there hasn’t been a software update to implement a feature I can build in to a compiled .exe that lotteralky took me 45 minutes to build from aware-the-tools-exist to implementation. Someone give me a billion dollars already. I’m clearly a genius.
  - reificator 7y ago
    Yeah AutoHotKey is surprisingly helpful for things that seem otherwise unautomateable. > You weren’t even talking about that. > The person you responded to wrote: > > custom control board with specialized buttons and keyboard > So we weren’t even talking about keyboard shortcuts in the ctrl-c sense, but that the specific action has a specific button. > How, indeed, could that have been a surprise. I considered typing keypad or array of buttons, but I figured keyboard conveyed the intended meaning closely enough.
aerodude 7y ago
> So successful products optimise for the UX of a user who doesn't yet know how to use the product well. And such users really love touchscreens. I think the problem is that touchscreens get ported to applications where there should be a reasonable expectation that the end user is an expert in the system. For example, cars, and aircraft. Touchscreens are great when you have portable systems that have to condense a lot of functionality into a small device, but I don't want to be in a position where a pilot has to touch the correct button on a touchscreen in the middle of serious turbulence. Likewise, no driver should be taking their eyes off the road to navigate to the air-conditioning tab. Applying touchscreens in these situations is not only bad engineering, it's outright dangerous. You have to demonstrate competent control of a vehicle just to operate it, so we shouldn't be assuming operators are brand new users that aren't committed to the product.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
StillBored 7y ago
This is something that has irritated me since windows/mac's started hiding the UI/shortcut hinting in favor of a "cleaner" interface. UI discoverability was a huge part of human/computer interaction research in the late 70's/80's. If you look at the menu's in win3.1 for example you will see that nearly every menu item has both the alt-menu, keystroke, shortcut as well as the global keyboard shortcut to the right of the menu entry. AKA alt-f, s was save, but some applications might have also put another keyboard shortcut to the right say 'ctr-s' or something. This means that your average user who kept clicking the file->save menu could see that alt-f,s (via the underlines) would perform the same function without the mouse, or just that there was a simple shortcut. Windows gradually removed this, and in the xp timeframe you only saw the shortcuts when the alt key was pressed while the menus were active. This of course defeats the purpose of sticking the shortcut in the users face everytime they click the menu, and the concept has stuck around to the point where in win10 google is pretty much the only way to discover shortcuts if the even exist (which is hardly rare). This is part of the reason I stick to the classic interface in win7, with the right tweaks its still puts the keyboard shortcuts in your face. I only wish that modern UI designers spent a day or two actually reading the human/computer guidelines/research before calling themselves experts..
- SteveMoody73 7y ago
  The ALT-f-s option still works in a lot of windows software now. Microsoft Office will even overlay the letter of the keypress on top of the menu item.

reificator 7y ago

But I wasn't talking about onboarding. I was talking about the speed of people using your software to do work on either a touchscreen or a keyboard.

p_l 7y ago
The decision makers in UI design often design for "someone ripped from plow by grenade", as the saying goes in Poland - someone who has no idea about the product at all. Others tend to follow this. All of that results in undiscoverable interfaces designed for first-time users and horrible for everything else, and thus cult of first mouse, now touchscreen.
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
You weren’t even talking about that. The person you responded to wrote: > custom control board with specialized buttons and keyboard So we weren’t even talking about keyboard shortcuts in the ctrl-c sense, but that the specific action has a specific button. How, indeed, could that have been a surprise. Here’s a my stupid story: On the laser cutter I operate there as no way to tell the machine “the stock / remnant / offcut I want to cut the parts from is located at x,y”. The machine has a touch screen display which shows the cutting heads current location. So you put it in manual mode, drive the cutting head in to the start position as per your materials location, then type the coordinates it displays as a graphic in to two fields in a dialogue box. There’s no button on the machine or touch screen to automate that. This is why I think UX professionals will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes. Thankfully I’m aware of AutoHotKey, and Capture2Text, so I wrote a script to turn a keyboard shortcut in to a series of mousse movements, clicks, and OCR, to take the graphic display if numbers and turn them in to strings of numbers. I still can’t believe there hasn’t been a software update to implement a feature I can build in to a compiled .exe that lotteralky took me 45 minutes to build from aware-the-tools-exist to implementation. Someone give me a billion dollars already. I’m clearly a genius.
- reificator 7y ago
  Yeah AutoHotKey is surprisingly helpful for things that seem otherwise unautomateable. > You weren’t even talking about that. > The person you responded to wrote: > > custom control board with specialized buttons and keyboard > So we weren’t even talking about keyboard shortcuts in the ctrl-c sense, but that the specific action has a specific button. > How, indeed, could that have been a surprise. I considered typing keypad or array of buttons, but I figured keyboard conveyed the intended meaning closely enough.

aerodude 7y ago

> So successful products optimise for the UX of a user who doesn't yet know how to use the product well. And such users really love touchscreens. I think the problem is that touchscreens get ported to applications where there should be a reasonable expectation that the end user is an expert in the system. For example, cars, and aircraft. Touchscreens are great when you have portable systems that have to condense a lot of functionality into a small device, but I don't want to be in a position where a pilot has to touch the correct button on a touchscreen in the middle of serious turbulence. Likewise, no driver should be taking their eyes off the road to navigate to the air-conditioning tab. Applying touchscreens in these situations is not only bad engineering, it's outright dangerous. You have to demonstrate competent control of a vehicle just to operate it, so we shouldn't be assuming operators are brand new users that aren't committed to the product.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

StillBored 7y ago

This is something that has irritated me since windows/mac's started hiding the UI/shortcut hinting in favor of a "cleaner" interface. UI discoverability was a huge part of human/computer interaction research in the late 70's/80's. If you look at the menu's in win3.1 for example you will see that nearly every menu item has both the alt-menu, keystroke, shortcut as well as the global keyboard shortcut to the right of the menu entry. AKA alt-f, s was save, but some applications might have also put another keyboard shortcut to the right say 'ctr-s' or something. This means that your average user who kept clicking the file->save menu could see that alt-f,s (via the underlines) would perform the same function without the mouse, or just that there was a simple shortcut. Windows gradually removed this, and in the xp timeframe you only saw the shortcuts when the alt key was pressed while the menus were active. This of course defeats the purpose of sticking the shortcut in the users face everytime they click the menu, and the concept has stuck around to the point where in win10 google is pretty much the only way to discover shortcuts if the even exist (which is hardly rare). This is part of the reason I stick to the classic interface in win7, with the right tweaks its still puts the keyboard shortcuts in your face. I only wish that modern UI designers spent a day or two actually reading the human/computer guidelines/research before calling themselves experts..

SteveMoody73 7y ago
The ALT-f-s option still works in a lot of windows software now. Microsoft Office will even overlay the letter of the keypress on top of the menu item.