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I'm re-writing a program I wrote right out of college, now I know a lot more about the programming language, but I'm not too up on common design issues and I don't want to leave anything out this time; I want to make the keyboard shortcuts perfect and above all common!

I'm writing a program that allows users to customize a form with groupboxes, checkboxes, labels, edits and some custom stuff. I've got several functions that I've implemented with mouse clicks and menus (delete, copy, paste, cut, setup/properties, align, resize, move).

My main question is, what other functions might my users expect to have and what would their keyboard shortcuts be?

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I was going to take a stab at your question yesterday, but thought I should think it through first.

I really couldn't tell you what "other functions" you should provide for your users. I am not apart of your team. It looks like you nailed the majority of them, but ultimately I cannot make a decision or provide advice when we really do not have the full details as to what your app does outside of allowing them to create a form.

I can, however, point you towards some other apps out there that may give you some ideas as to what functionality you could add.

You could come up with all kinds of crazy keyboard shortcuts for your app. However, you may want to stick to the most commonly used ones, which it looks like you already have listed. If your going to create new shortcuts, make sure they are intuitive to the user.

I hope that those links prove to spark some ideas for you and your team, and sorry I couldn't provide exact examples.

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  • Thanks, that was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Just the standard stuff. Whether or not it makes sense to use the number pad for moving stuff to left and right. I guess the program I'm redesigning would be most similar to MS Visio or OpenOffice Draw for the shortcuts.
    – Peter Turner
    Nov 16, 2010 at 16:25

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