4 ms·

I feel like a large part of the unintuitiveness of keyboard interfaces is not actually an intrinsic quality of keyboard interfaces since they're so often confla

I feel like a large part of the unintuitiveness of keyboard interfaces is not actually an intrinsic quality of keyboard interfaces since they're so often conflated with command-line or TUI interfaces. There might be an alternative but yet undiscovered paradigm which combines the best of both worlds: keyboard control and intuitive, beautiful, graphical widgets. To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if we had a typical GUI but named each control (button, field, etc) with a short code (1-2 letters), in the style of Vimperator/Tridactyl/Vimium? You lose none of the intuitiveness and discoverability, but suddenly you can select the control much more quickly and precisely than clumsily trying to point a mouse pointer onto it. And that's just a silly example I came off the top of my head now. There may be much better keyboard-centric yet intuitive paradigms.

naravara 7y ago
>To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if we had a typical GUI but named each control (button, field, etc) with a short code (1-2 letters), in the style of Vimperator/Tridactyl/Vimium? Excel basically does this. If you hold down alt it hovers the companion hotkey above each function on the ribbon. It is very handy for learning your way around. I think this is actually the big challenge with keyboard interfaces is that there is a learning curve. The advantage of mouse (or even mores touchscreens) is that a literal monkey can figure it out. But they're also limited in what they can do and how quickly they can do it. Meanwhile, keyboard based inputs take some time to learn but become extremely powerful once you're adept at them. But for non-power users who aren't that comfortable navigating a computer, it can feel like trying to learn a musical instrument for them. We nerds can flit from one interface to another because a lot of the general mechanics and muscle memory can carry over. But for people who haven't trained that skill it's much harder to learn these things, similar to playing video games. People who have never done it have no clue what they're doing when you put a controller in their hands.
- feanaro 7y ago
  I mostly agree with your point: keyboard interfaces are often harder to learn than the standard graphical mouse interface. But I'd like to argue that a mouse also takes a bit of time to grok when you first encounter it. A simple interface like "each thing on the screen has a two-letter code; type the code to select it" doesn't sound intrinsically harder to explain to me than teaching someone how to use a mouse the first time. Especially when you consider that there's often a lot of subtlety in when to use the right or the left button. I find this is something that often trips up people that are encountering a mouse for the first time.
- josinalvo 7y ago
  > no clue what they're doing when you put a controller in their hands. May I agree to that? I am a power user by any measure (CS major and program for a living) but still fail to grasp the controls of the simplest video game, to the point that, after hours of play, I still confuse (say) jump and attack
- ptx 7y ago
  Older versions of Excel, that had traditional menus, did this by underlining the access key so you could see it immediately at a glance without first holding down alt and waiting. And so did every other Windows program (and OS/2, and GTK, and Qt).
ptx 7y ago
I'm not sure if you're aware that standard GUIs (common 90s-style GUIs based on IBM's CUA[1] design) already do this. Every control can be assigned an access key[2] that allows you to access it with alt + some letter, with the letter indicated using an underscore. The trend lately seems to be to hide the underscore until you hold down alt for a while, which makes the feature much more difficult to use when you don't know every shortcut by heart. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/inter-accessibility#access-keys https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/inter...
- feanaro 7y ago
  I was aware of this as a thing that programs often did but wasn't aware that this was a standard. Thanks! That said, I find that even when programs support this for accessing menus, they often do not support clicking buttons and focusing text boxes using it, so it could be taken further.
  - ptx 7y ago
    They can, and they often do (or used to). It works with both buttons and text boxes – the latter by connecting the text box to an adjacent label. Have a look at some older piece of UI in Windows and hold down alt for a while. All we need for this to be taken further is for the programmer to pay a bit of attention to the existing feature and make use of it. For a non-Windows example, I just looked at the XFCE appearance settings dialog. Hold down alt for a few seconds and you'll see that every single control has an access key: all the tabs, all the buttons, all the checkboxes, all the dropdowns.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      I'm on Linux and I quickly tried some of my most commonly used software, such as Firefox and Deluge, but they did not seem to be supporting this, unfortunately. Only the menus get their access keys highlighted.

naravara 7y ago

>To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if we had a typical GUI but named each control (button, field, etc) with a short code (1-2 letters), in the style of Vimperator/Tridactyl/Vimium? Excel basically does this. If you hold down alt it hovers the companion hotkey above each function on the ribbon. It is very handy for learning your way around. I think this is actually the big challenge with keyboard interfaces is that there is a learning curve. The advantage of mouse (or even mores touchscreens) is that a literal monkey can figure it out. But they're also limited in what they can do and how quickly they can do it. Meanwhile, keyboard based inputs take some time to learn but become extremely powerful once you're adept at them. But for non-power users who aren't that comfortable navigating a computer, it can feel like trying to learn a musical instrument for them. We nerds can flit from one interface to another because a lot of the general mechanics and muscle memory can carry over. But for people who haven't trained that skill it's much harder to learn these things, similar to playing video games. People who have never done it have no clue what they're doing when you put a controller in their hands.

feanaro 7y ago
I mostly agree with your point: keyboard interfaces are often harder to learn than the standard graphical mouse interface. But I'd like to argue that a mouse also takes a bit of time to grok when you first encounter it. A simple interface like "each thing on the screen has a two-letter code; type the code to select it" doesn't sound intrinsically harder to explain to me than teaching someone how to use a mouse the first time. Especially when you consider that there's often a lot of subtlety in when to use the right or the left button. I find this is something that often trips up people that are encountering a mouse for the first time.
josinalvo 7y ago
> no clue what they're doing when you put a controller in their hands. May I agree to that? I am a power user by any measure (CS major and program for a living) but still fail to grasp the controls of the simplest video game, to the point that, after hours of play, I still confuse (say) jump and attack
ptx 7y ago
Older versions of Excel, that had traditional menus, did this by underlining the access key so you could see it immediately at a glance without first holding down alt and waiting. And so did every other Windows program (and OS/2, and GTK, and Qt).

ptx 7y ago

I'm not sure if you're aware that standard GUIs (common 90s-style GUIs based on IBM's CUA[1] design) already do this. Every control can be assigned an access key[2] that allows you to access it with alt + some letter, with the letter indicated using an underscore. The trend lately seems to be to hide the underscore until you hold down alt for a while, which makes the feature much more difficult to use when you don't know every shortcut by heart. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/inter-accessibility#access-keys https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/inter...

feanaro 7y ago
I was aware of this as a thing that programs often did but wasn't aware that this was a standard. Thanks! That said, I find that even when programs support this for accessing menus, they often do not support clicking buttons and focusing text boxes using it, so it could be taken further.
- ptx 7y ago
  They can, and they often do (or used to). It works with both buttons and text boxes – the latter by connecting the text box to an adjacent label. Have a look at some older piece of UI in Windows and hold down alt for a while. All we need for this to be taken further is for the programmer to pay a bit of attention to the existing feature and make use of it. For a non-Windows example, I just looked at the XFCE appearance settings dialog. Hold down alt for a few seconds and you'll see that every single control has an access key: all the tabs, all the buttons, all the checkboxes, all the dropdowns.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    I'm on Linux and I quickly tried some of my most commonly used software, such as Firefox and Deluge, but they did not seem to be supporting this, unfortunately. Only the menus get their access keys highlighted.