Hot answers tagged keyboard
103
I'm the guy who did all the prototyping on Google Instant, and I attended >90% of the user studies we conducted at Google. (and I'm going to try not to be biased!)
We went through several iterations of prototypes based on our internal testing. What we found worked really well with the current implementation was that study participants either (1) saw the ...
35
There's this humongous article called Keyboard Trivia that has collected many of the theories and stories. The summary of facts:
Touch-tone key pad was designed to mimic the rotary dial with the "1" on top and the 7-8-9 on the bottom, and AT&T conducted user testing to confirm that this configuration helped eliminate dialing errors.
By the time when ...
30
Good UX because they asked a lot more people than you did. :-) There's a great write-up on Google's blog.
We knew it would take extensive
testing to find the right design, so
we ran through a sequence of
prototypes, usability studies (testing
with people from the community),
dogfooding (testing with Google
employees) and search experiments
...
26
Cant stand the thing.
It's too slow It can sometimes take a good few seconds for the page to update. When it does, you've continued to type, but you have just seen the gem of a result.. but oh no, it's now rebuilding the list again based of the latest garble of text you've entered - and your gem is buried in the haystack once more
It's very distracting ...
20
The answer is more trivial than you probably think - it's because h, j, k, l were respectively left, down, up, right arrows on the ADM-3A terminal which Bill Joy used when creating the original Vi [1].
[1] http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys/
16
You could try to approach this with an, "tell them about better ways to do what they are doing when they do it" approach. For example, if I am selecting text and clicking bold, that is fine, but if I do that over and over maybe have a modeless (non disruptive, out of the way) notification that could say something like, "Did you know you can press ctrl-b to ...
16
Fade out the edge that wraps (as well as leaving the button hanging over the edge so that it's clearer that there is more unseen content. Clearer because not only is what is off screen not visible but a little bit of what is on screen is not visible as well.
Alternatively try and make out that it's like a conveyor belt or something that physically wraps ...
15
I believe much of the innovation over the next few years will be in things that avoid this type of input altogether (e.g. Voice, gesture, sensing). The progress in these areas signal that keyboards are inherently limited for some applications.
Most of the variations in input are still based on the QWERTY layout. Products like SWYPE and Blackberry's new ...
13
I don't like their implementation of instant results.
I love filtering results when the list is a regular font size and can only become more exact with the more text provided to the filter itself. (e.g. taking a list of 300 items and after 6 letters showing only 4 results.)
My major beef with Google's implementation is:
The update area is too big, the ...
13
I imagine we're at least a couple decades away from the keyboard going away, if not three or four or even more. . When it does go away, the effect will be the opposite of what you imagine. It won't be the keyboard going away that creates new ways to interact with desktop apps. Rather, it will be new ways of interacting with desktop apps that may, some day, ...
12
The most important difference seems to be the contrast between the key background and the letters. Note also that the font on the iPhone keyboard is bold while the iPad's is not.
The iPhone is much smaller and likely to be used outdoors so the extremely bright off-white shade of the keys makes sense. Black-on-White is ideal for outdoors, though the iPad's ...
12
Yes, this is excellent practice. It can even improve the responsiveness of your application, because doing the actual search on every key press can cause delays in itself.
I have build a component (that we're using all over the place for this and similar purposes) that basically sets two times: a minimum time to wait for more input, and a maximum time from ...
11
If I were you, I would add tooltips like on Microsoft Excel 2010 and add help page with a list of shortcuts (something like this). I think that should be enough.
Screenshot of russian Microsoft Excel, displaying tooltip when hovering over bold icon.
11
I don't see the need for any new studies in this area. The issue is that people usually take the results out of context. You can't comparing using a mouse to learning a keyboard command and then using it. Apples and oranges. Let me summarise what we know.
If you don't know the keyboard command, it is usually faster to use the mouse as it has a lower ...
11
Keyboards are still sold with numpads because there is a demand for them. Many people use them a lot (think any form of numeric data entry), and would have their work negatively impacted without the numpad there.
That said, there are plenty of keyboards (both bluetooth and wired) that don't have a numpad.
Another simple solution (if you're really ...
10
Finger pecking is not a good method to enter information. Rather than trying to adapt the keyboard we should adapt the input mechanism. There is plenty of research going into virtual keyboards based around video and finger based input. Some are even available commercially. And of course voice is improving rapidly. Hopefully we won't be dependent on tiny ...
9
Yes, there are studies that claims that Dvorak is faster than QWERTY.
(But you'll also find other studies that claims otherwise.)
Dvorak
It's based on total finger movement that is needed to write common English words. So the Dvorak layout has the most frequently used characters on the middle row, and the rarely used ones on the top and bottom row. ...
9
I don't have any studies for auto-complete in particular, but perceptible latency for a user interface is thought to be at 100 milliseconds. At that point, the user feels that they are in control and the interface is responsive.
With that in mind, there are a few factors you should consider.
How quickly will your query return on slow internet ...
8
Horsefeathers. As someone who writes, both English and code, I don't see the keyboard disappearing in my lifetime. I think it was Joel on Software who once described how voice recognition software got up to X% about ten (or more?) years ago, then stalled and has gotten no better since. And is not expected to. For an interface that does not require input ...
8
I don't design desktop applications so I don't have much experience with options there, but I can give you some examples that might inspire.
Gmail
I've also always liked how Gmail does keyboard shortcuts. They're very simple, not requiring you to learn and use multiple keys at the same time and you can pop open a pane displaying all of them just by typing ...
8
To facilitate the discovery of shortcuts you can provide information of some shortcuts when the CTRL key is pressed.
In this way, when the user uses a basic shortcut (e.g., CTRL+C to copy) small tooltips can appear over the ribbon to indicate that more shortcuts are available.
Another option to announce the availability of shortcuts is to indicate them in ...
8
It's not really depending on the language layout, but more to the computer system you are using. Here's a list of computer systems and their relation to function keys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_key
I think that on a regular Windows PC you can safely assume that the function keys are there.
7
If you are already used to a QWERTY keyboard and you feel that the benefit of changing (which doesn't include speed) will be worth the time taken, as well as not easily being able to use someone else's keyboard, then you should take a look at the Colemak layout.
It has fewer changes from QWERTY than Dvorak, and keeps the position of many of the shortcut ...
7
1. Genereal Idea
I'm not from Canada but you could check the possible combinations and just provide the keys that are possible after typing or selecting one character.
2. six spinning wheels
K1A 0B1
Letter Number Letter Number Letter Number
Also here make sure just to display the possible next letter or number.
7
For me, the approach you have used for having icons scroll along a UI item that looks like part of the keyboard (a real-world item) does not work. A keyboard in real life does not have a revolving panel, so the fact that you are trying to create something that looks like a real-world item, and then make it do something that wouldn’t happen in real life, will ...
7
Some laptops don't have a dedicated numeric keypad. Some of these laptops activate the function-key numbers when num-lock is activated. And thus lots of users writes "He336 W6r3d" instead of "Hello world" And if this is entered during logon, they only see "*****" ;-)
7
There is a keyboard on the Google Play store called the MessagEase Keyboard that has a completely different layout to a traditional keyboard. I've inserted a screenshot so you can have a look.
You type by just sliding a thumb across the letters you want and while it's completely different, actually only takes an hour or so to get used to and not much more ...
7
I'd like to first of all debunk the theories of lazy programmers and global shortcuts. Lazy programmers (but not the lazy smart programmers) would not single out keyboard shortcuts as a particular requirement they're too lazy to do. There's nothing hard about setting it up. Most programming languages and frameworks provide functions and convenience ...
7
UX wise, I think there is very little argument that having the keys display the character that they represent is a good idea. So the question either comes down to a design decision, or one that they simply didn't consider.
I suspect that Apple were initially trying to mimic the look of a traditional keyboard, and so avoided doing this primarily as a design ...
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