41–50 of 59 posts
In particular, I have always considered backspace in browsers to be a misfeature, which should have been killed in the mosaic era the first time someone who didn't understand "focus" failed a task because of it.
I suspect it's because of Google Instant (a feature I don't really like), which has to interact with the server every time a key is pressed to ensure that the results are "live". If you use the gear icon in the top-right of Google.com to go to "Search settings" and turn off Google Instant, it may fix the problem.
Real people demonstrably do not care about keyboard navigation. Ctrl-C makes you anomalously good with computers! Given that real people are worth billions and don't run AdBlock I would optimize for their use rather than that of HN posters, too, if I ran Google's UI team. In particular, I have always considered backspace in browsers to be a misfeature, which should have been killed in the mosaic era the first time so…
1. I hate, hate, hate that the backspace key is a shortcut for "back". I have never, not once hit the backspace key wanting to go back to the previous page. 2. I'll generally give the bigger players like Google some lee-way in trying out new functionality like this. It's the smaller sites that should generally stick to familiarity (except for the handful who are making a point of exploring behaviors).
Real people demonstrably do not care about keyboard navigation. Ctrl-C makes you anomalously good with computers! Given that real people are worth billions and don't run AdBlock I would optimize for their use rather than that of HN posters, too, if I ran Google's UI team. In particular, I have always considered backspace in browsers to be a misfeature, which should have been killed in the mosaic era the first time so…
I don't understand your first line: if real people don't care about keyboard navigation, why do we care what the keyboard navigation is for those people, and not for people who do use it? Power users use keyboard shortcuts, so make it work for them. Also, consistency is king in UI design, that doesn't change because we're talking about 'real people'.
Real people demonstrably do not care about keyboard navigation. Ctrl-C makes you anomalously good with computers! Given that real people are worth billions and don't run AdBlock I would optimize for their use rather than that of HN posters, too, if I ran Google's UI team. In particular, I have always considered backspace in browsers to be a misfeature, which should have been killed in the mosaic era the first time so…
I don't understand your first line: if real people don't care about keyboard navigation, why do we care what the keyboard navigation is for those people, and not for people who do use it? Power users use keyboard shortcuts, so make it work for them. Also, consistency is king in UI design, that doesn't change because we're talking about 'real people'.
"Consistency is king in UI design" gets mentioned in a lot of books. So do tarot cards. I don't have good experimental apparati for disproving tarot predictions but UI consistency has been judged in the A/B test crucible numerous times and frequently been found wanting.
The sad thing is that many sites can't even get basic keyboard support right, and that's something HTML handles quite well. Classic example is Tab ordering. When I hit Tab, I should reach the most prominent and useful field immediately (almost always a big fat search field). But too often, my first Tab lands me somewhere useless, and if I'm really unlucky it even scrolls me all the way to the bottom of the page to re…
For those of us who breeze through signup forms with Olympic speed, it's sort of like Garfield getting out of bed and stepping on to a cold floor.
A close second: Not mapping forward slash for "search in page" in chrome. This is the single most requested feature in chrome that the devs refuse to implement (see issues 90 and 150 on the chromium projects bug tracker).