5 ms·

I can't reproduce your situation on Google Chrome. I do these exact steps: 1. Press Compose 2. Enter recipient 3. Press TAB 4. Enter subject 5. Press TAB 6. En

by dwild 14y ago

I can't reproduce your situation on Google Chrome. I do these exact steps: 1. Press Compose 2. Enter recipient 3. Press TAB 4. Enter subject 5. Press TAB 6. Enter message 7. Press TAB At the end the focus is on Send, which is an expected behavior and it displays a tooltip that says "Send (Ctrl-Enter)". I'm able to send the message if I press SPACE or ENTER, but again, it's an expected behavior when you get the focus on a button (the tooltip can be misleading). Do you have more information that could help finding the cause?

ColinWright 14y ago
After re-reading, I freely admit that parts of this make me sound really angry, and to some extent I am. I'm finding the Google Mail interface, and Google products in general, just get in the way, and stop me from working. I have to change to work the way they want, and many times that removes from me facilities that I depend on. So just to let you know that I'm having a bad day, and I apologise in advance for some ranting. And so, to reply to your point. I'm no longer on the machine I was using, and I was using Firefox on Ubuntu, not Chrome. I won't be able to test your sequence on the original configuration until Friday at the earliest. Plus, in trying to log in on the appropriate account, I'm told I'm already logged in with a different one, and do I want to link the accounts? No. How can I proceed? It appears I can't. I either have to log out the other account, which would be a pain, or link the accounts, which I can't do because of separation of concerns. There are times I really, really hate Google. There's no link that says - no, just log me in, dammit. So I reload the page and oh look! I'm logged in! That's obvious ... So, now to proceed with what you say ... and yes, what you say has exactly the effect you describe, which is exactly the effect I expected. Earlier today, however, on a different machine, with Firefox, I clicked Compose, clicked in the recipient box and type the address, clicked in the subject box and completed the subject, clicked in the text box and started composing. Part way through I was generating a plain-text style bullet list and hit return, then TAB. The message was then sent, despite my expectation. That's as far as I can recall, but I did it a second time and it did the same thing. I'm pretty sure I didn't hit space or enter after hitting TAB, although I can't guarantee that now, several hours, much typing, and several tasks later. So here's the point for other designers of user interfaces. When your use is in a text box, TAB might take them out without them realizing, and then hitting ENTER or SPACE might perform an action they really aren't expecting, and didn't want. perhaps you should design the interface so that the button they get to after the text box does not perform an irreversible action.
- bradleyland 14y ago
  > So here's the point for other designers of user interfaces. When your use is in a text box, TAB might take them out without them realizing, and then hitting ENTER or SPACE might perform an action they really aren't expecting, and didn't want. perhaps you should design the interface so that the button they get to after the text box does not perform an irreversible action. After typing my reply in the other thread, I read far enough down the page to get to this entry, and I have to say I agree 100% with what you've said here. The fact that pressing [TAB, space] sends the email irreversibly is dangerous, and can pretty easily happen by accident when typing quickly. Having said that, the behavior of TAB moving between form elements is a long standing behavior. Many "power users" use it to great effect, but it's discoverability is very poor. The solution is a tough compromise though. In Gmail, many users rely on the [TAB, space] sequence to send email. I do the same thing on Hacker News. When I finish my comment, I use [TAB, space] to submit my comment. The people who write the software are loath to give that up. My feeling is that within the rich text editing area of an email message, TAB ought to insert a tab character, but I'm not sure how difficult that is. The TAB keypress is handled by the browser, so if the Gmail devs were to go through the trouble of trapping TAB and inserting the tab character in to the text area, they'd be breaking the expected behavior of the web browser. In that way, this solution creates another problem. Which one is "right"? It's a bit of a paradox. If nothing else, I hope this helps shed some light on why these design decisions aren't always as straight forward as they seem.

by dwild 14y ago

ColinWright 14y ago

After re-reading, I freely admit that parts of this make me sound really angry, and to some extent I am. I'm finding the Google Mail interface, and Google products in general, just get in the way, and stop me from working. I have to change to work the way they want, and many times that removes from me facilities that I depend on. So just to let you know that I'm having a bad day, and I apologise in advance for some ranting. And so, to reply to your point. I'm no longer on the machine I was using, and I was using Firefox on Ubuntu, not Chrome. I won't be able to test your sequence on the original configuration until Friday at the earliest. Plus, in trying to log in on the appropriate account, I'm told I'm already logged in with a different one, and do I want to link the accounts? No. How can I proceed? It appears I can't. I either have to log out the other account, which would be a pain, or link the accounts, which I can't do because of separation of concerns. There are times I really, really hate Google. There's no link that says - no, just log me in, dammit. So I reload the page and oh look! I'm logged in! That's obvious ... So, now to proceed with what you say ... and yes, what you say has exactly the effect you describe, which is exactly the effect I expected. Earlier today, however, on a different machine, with Firefox, I clicked Compose, clicked in the recipient box and type the address, clicked in the subject box and completed the subject, clicked in the text box and started composing. Part way through I was generating a plain-text style bullet list and hit return, then TAB. The message was then sent, despite my expectation. That's as far as I can recall, but I did it a second time and it did the same thing. I'm pretty sure I didn't hit space or enter after hitting TAB, although I can't guarantee that now, several hours, much typing, and several tasks later. So here's the point for other designers of user interfaces. When your use is in a text box, TAB might take them out without them realizing, and then hitting ENTER or SPACE might perform an action they really aren't expecting, and didn't want. perhaps you should design the interface so that the button they get to after the text box does not perform an irreversible action.

bradleyland 14y ago
> So here's the point for other designers of user interfaces. When your use is in a text box, TAB might take them out without them realizing, and then hitting ENTER or SPACE might perform an action they really aren't expecting, and didn't want. perhaps you should design the interface so that the button they get to after the text box does not perform an irreversible action. After typing my reply in the other thread, I read far enough down the page to get to this entry, and I have to say I agree 100% with what you've said here. The fact that pressing [TAB, space] sends the email irreversibly is dangerous, and can pretty easily happen by accident when typing quickly. Having said that, the behavior of TAB moving between form elements is a long standing behavior. Many "power users" use it to great effect, but it's discoverability is very poor. The solution is a tough compromise though. In Gmail, many users rely on the [TAB, space] sequence to send email. I do the same thing on Hacker News. When I finish my comment, I use [TAB, space] to submit my comment. The people who write the software are loath to give that up. My feeling is that within the rich text editing area of an email message, TAB ought to insert a tab character, but I'm not sure how difficult that is. The TAB keypress is handled by the browser, so if the Gmail devs were to go through the trouble of trapping TAB and inserting the tab character in to the text area, they'd be breaking the expected behavior of the web browser. In that way, this solution creates another problem. Which one is "right"? It's a bit of a paradox. If nothing else, I hope this helps shed some light on why these design decisions aren't always as straight forward as they seem.