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GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

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Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#201

Post by neutronicus »

manlymuppet wrote: post #56

Power user experience is not the same thing as user experience in general. If you want to make the argument that all developer tooling should be keyboard-driven, fine, be my guest. But most people aren't willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs, and that's okay. We shouldn't force it. HN's insistence on acting like all users are Arch Linux efficiency perfectionist hacker types is painfully corn…

FWIW, I think it's a blind spot to think of power users as "Arch Linux people" using "developer tooling".

My wife is a UX Design consultant and she had an engagement where a bunch of state government accountants were bemoaning how a redesigned procurement platform took away all their keyboard shortcuts.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#202

Post by Telaneo »

eldaisfish wrote: post #97
manlymuppet wrote: post #56

Power user experience is not the same thing as user experience in general. If you want to make the argument that all developer tooling should be keyboard-driven, fine, be my guest. But most people aren't willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs, and that's okay. We shouldn't force it. HN's insistence on acting like all users are Arch Linux efficiency perfectionist hacker types is painfully corn…

you are arguing against a strawman. Most reasonable people want support for both keyboard and mouse-based navigation. For example, why did Edge and possible chrome, remove support for Back via the backspace key? Literally, why remove something that exists and that some people might use? Same with some web forms where hitting enter in a text box does nothing. I expect it to submit a form, but very often, it does nothi…

I specifically had to disable that via about:config in Firefox ages ago because I pressed it by accident all the time. Often while I was going through a 30 point form, only to then lose all my progress. To be fair, browsers probably should try to not undo progress like that, so you can just go forward again and get right back where I started, but I've never trusted them to actually do that. I've been burned too many times.

I can kinda get that one.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#205

Post by layer8 »

RobotToaster wrote: post #155
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #12

Keyboard accessibility is one of those things that tends to get swept under the rug or forgotten about entirely alongside accessibility in general. The funny thing is that the former usually falls out of the latter. Part of the blame lands on the shoulders of popular UI frameworks (or in the case of those choosing to eschew use of such, the developers who made that choice). The older frameworks tend to make this fair…

Are there any modern cross-platform GUI frameworks that do this well?

Unfortunately, the intersection between “modern” and “do this well” is pretty much the empty set.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#206

Post by layer8 »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #173
preg_match wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where this falls apart is commercial software. The issue is we use off-the-shelf frameworks and tools for commercial software. And then we don't train developers on how to write high-volume software. Commercial software is THE power user use case. Your users will be using your software 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for years. And still, the software is obtuse point-and-click garbage. Meanwhile commercial software fro…

I think you vaaastly overestimate how excel is used by most users if anything, excel exceeds in being MOUSE-driven - it's intuitive in what you press and what you drag and that's kinda my problem with the TFA - author is not representative of typical user. Mouse interaction is the king

Maybe by most users, but not by most users who use it for many hours daily for professional tasks (i.e. not just as a kind of tabular list editor).

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#207

Post by whartung »

advis wrote: post #182

I do agree to some extent, but were GUIs not made specifically to reduce so much reliance on the keyboard? And a few people here did mention that this "fully keyboard-driven" workflow would probably be used by power users primarily. Like anything else in life, I think there's no single answer to this. But for people interested in seeing the difference between mouse-driven vs keyboard-driven flows while web browsing,…

I would submit that the point of the GUI was necessarily "anti-keyboard" as more "pro-discovery", plus adding gestures that would be difficult on a keyboard.

Keyboard interfaces can be, but not necessarily, quite opaque. There's a reason in the old days companies shipped keyboard overlays and function key templates to help users (or went all in with custom keyboards built for the application).

In contrast consider something like Wordstar where you pretty much just needed to memorize the three prefix keys, and if you pressed one and waiting, you'd get a menu describing all of the options.

Obviously, things like early Smalltalk and, probably, Xerox (having never used any of the early Xerox systems), relied heavily on the mouse, but even it had command accelerators.

The CUA standard was that crossover that Windows, and MOTIF, adopted. Much of that work is still with us today, and it worked well both on GUIs and TUIs (witness the old Turbo Pascal/C++ IDEs, and other applications). Those character based applications had to assume there was no mouse, but offer the flexibility of being good citizens should a mouse be present.

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#209

Post by Eji1700 »

manlymuppet wrote: post #56

Power user experience is not the same thing as user experience in general. If you want to make the argument that all developer tooling should be keyboard-driven, fine, be my guest. But most people aren't willing to deal with the learning curve of keyboard-driven GUIs, and that's okay. We shouldn't force it. HN's insistence on acting like all users are Arch Linux efficiency perfectionist hacker types is painfully corn…

Eh I think things like vimium have kinda solved this.

Push a button, every icon is now labeled with a key, type that key, counts as a click, done.

I get that this does NOT solve for say, someone who's blind (i guess you could announce them, not sure), but it is easy enough I've found even lower tech people are fine with it.

As always, a lot of the trick is communicating the interface and using modern standards, not "Well it's ctrl + insert because that's what it is on linux"

Re: GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

#210

Post by eichin »

Back in the early 1990s, mice were fragile enough that Apollo salespeople were trained to be able to do their demos keyboard-only as backup (at least for tradeshows) and that was just generally how interfaces were built. It wasn't an accessibility thing, it was a "we're demoing expensive systems to even more expensive people, it had better work" thing...
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