I find it interesting that a number of interfaces are now offering “shortcuts” to mouse clicking everywhere.

While desktop search applications already provide this kind of convenience for finding files, such an interface for finding commands is quite interesting, to me.

I have noticed this more so in products used typically by technical people.

For example, on the Mac at various places, such as the System Preferences, you can type for the settings you want to adjust and the application will highlight possible matches for you:

KDE 4, a Linux window manager, has a start-like menu (called the KickOff) where you can type the program you want to find:

Vista has a similar thing from its Start menu:

Various software development tools from the excellent Resharper add-in for C# in Visual Studio, to API documentation readers, all offer some way to type in the class, file, method etc you are looking for. And such features are sometimes an efficient alternative to clicking through large trees of information:

Someone wrote a very useful jQuery API guide where the main form of navigation is to begin typing for the api feature you are looking for:

The Office add-on for finding commands, while still in early testing, is a feature that targets more than just technical users, so it will be interesting to see how this works out.

Is Microsoft’s announcement a sign of failure of the Ribbon interface? I don’t think so; it may be more reflective of the challenge they find of getting users who are so used to a well-established product to doing things dramatically differently.

As people are getting more used to searching on the web, perhaps that metaphor is making its way back into more traditional user interfaces and that typing is perhaps no longer seen as a poor usability option compared to clicking around using a mouse.

(To clarify, I don’t expect, or want to imply, that typing/command lines etc should replace window managers and pointing/clicking interfaces; instead, there seems to be some appropriate situations where typing looks more efficient than clicking, often in places where the GUI was there because of the advantages of pointing and clicking. Or, at least, typing helps augment a GUI, reducing barriers.)

This reminds of my first job (technically a placement year/internship at Northern Telecom in London but it was such a good experience I consider it a proper job!) in 1996 looking at the HP-UX box on my desk (HP’s UNIX machines) trying to get it all set up and asking the person opposite how to use the file manager GUI to do a certain thing; she just looked at me, smiled, and said, “just use the console; typing is a lot more efficient!”

Typing seems to have become the new mouse clicking…

We tend to think of usability as the foundation of the work that we do. It sets the minimum requirement for a design to be successful, so if you’re not doing usability work you won’t know what that requirement is. Philosophically, that’s where we come from.

I think a lot of people look at usability as the ultimate end goal of the design process, but we don’t see it that way either. We see it as the place that you start, but there is lot more that a design should do than just attaining usability.

Usability doesn’t really get at the psychological and emotional context of use. Usability will tell you, from an ergonomic perspective, what people can do with a product, but there is lot more to making a product successful in the marketplace and making a product feel successful in people’s minds. Often, we find that clients come to us, thinking they have a usability problem, but it turns out that their products are pretty usable. The reason that the product is falling short is it is not satisfying an emotional or psychological need.

– Jesse James Garrett on Ajax, Amazon and Web 2.0, E-consultancy.com, August 2007

(Via UsabilityNews.com)

While young people embrace the Web with real or virtual friends and their cell phone is never far away, relatively few like technology and those that do tend to be in Brazil, India and China, according to a survey.

Only a handful think of technology as a concept.

… “Young people don’t see ‘tech’ as a separate entity – it’s an organic part of their lives,” said Andrew Davidson, vice president of MTV’s VBS International Insight unit.

“Talking to them about the role of technology in their lifestyle would be like talking to kids in the 1980s about the role the park swing or the telephone played in their social lives — it’s invisible.”

Young keep it simple in high-tech world: survey, Reuters, July 24, 2007

(Via UsabilityNews.com for summary as above link may expire at some point.)

I think that is a fair point. In a way, to be expected. For web sites, when done well, for the user it is how good it is to use not what techniques were used to create it.

Only us developers care about the details. As my wife would rightly say to me if I go into the details too much, “one naught, one naught!”

(I guess it will be interesting to see how these attitudes change or not over the years, especially if and when Brazil, China, India etc become the new economic powers of the world.)

Sometimes, all I have done is just the following:

• Switch from Arial to Verdana
• Put some line-height on the body (a good amount, such as 1.5, even 1.8 or more)
• Where I can, provide good use of margins and paddings around major chunks of content

Nothing more. And those times I have not thought much of it, but then I get a few comments like “Wow! It looks SO much better! What did you do!”

Conclusion? CSS line-height and white space are your friends! Not only do they improve usability, but simple accessibility, too, while being more aesthetically pleasing. Use them!

Side notes:

• Other times, I may have also needed to improve/clean the markup too.
• Public links not available at the moment, sorry — will see if I can get some screenshots.
• If you require a serif font, try switching from the narrow Times New Roman to something wider like Georgia. Wider fonts (for content) such as Verdana and Georgia improve screen reading, as the brain can more easily make out the shapes etc. For that reason, also avoid all caps. Titles are a different case, and things like Times New Roman (especially italicized) can look quite nice. My personal thought of Arial: I don’t like it!