Jegan Chen » Usability http://www.jeganchen.com/blog Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:59:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Hijacking Standardized Keyboard Shortcuts http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/2009/03/15/hijacking-standardized-keyboard-shortcuts/ http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/2009/03/15/hijacking-standardized-keyboard-shortcuts/#comments Mon, 16 Mar 2009 05:55:14 +0000 Jegan http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/?p=47 If you enjoyed reading this, you may also like: ]]> I love keyboard shortcuts, and I think they can make you extra productive if you utilize them. I always use keyboard shortcuts, and use them for everything when I can: alt+tab, shift+end, ctrl+tab, ctrl+c, etc. I even use ones that seem crazy complex for certain applications like Photoshop: ctrl+alt+shift+s (save for web), but it definitely saves time. Using these shortcuts, I can pretty much use almost all the features on a computer without a mouse.

The problem I have is with the use of keyboard shortcuts for web applications. The keyboard shortcuts that are used for web applications are not standardized! Keyboard shortcuts should never override commonly used ones like ctrl+c for copy or ctrl+v for pasting. I bring this issue up because of my recent frustration with the ctrl+b shortcut.

In Word and other text editors, ctrl+b bolds text. This is pretty much a standard convention, and it’s something ingrained in my muscle memory. However, when I’m editing text in a content management system or email on a website, ctrl+b does some funky things. The first program that overrode my ctrl+b shortcut was Delicious. I installed the Delicious toolbar in Internet Explorer, and it hijacks my ctrl+b shortcut to open up the Delicious bookmarks sidebar! This was unbelievably frustrating when I edit text and forget that ctrl+b does something else in Internet Explorer.

On top of this, I recently installed the Last.fm application on my desktop, and now that hijacks my ctrl+b shortcut to “ban” songs in my playlist! So now every time I forget and hit ctrl+b to bold something, it “bans” a song in my Last.fm playlist, or opens up the Delicious bookmark sidebar!

There needs to be some kind of standardization of keyboard shortcuts so that the most common ones aren’t hijacked by new applications. It’s extremely difficult to train someone to forget or change the mental association of keyboard shortcuts, especially the most standard ones. So application developers please leave my keyboard shortcuts alone!

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]]> http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/2009/03/15/hijacking-standardized-keyboard-shortcuts/feed/ 2 BusinessOnLine’s Optimized Newsletter http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/2009/03/12/businessonlines-optimized-newsletter/ http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/2009/03/12/businessonlines-optimized-newsletter/#comments Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:07:52 +0000 Jegan http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/?p=40 If you enjoyed reading this, you may also like: ]]> I recently wrote a featured article for BusinessOnLine’s March newsletter, OPTIMIZED. I talk about a couple of the most common usability problems that we come across, and walk through a couple of examples. Here’s an excerpt:

The usability team here at BusinessOnLine recently took some time to reflect on our projects from the past year in preparation for our upcoming whitepaper, Top 10 Usability Problems of 2008. Many of the websites we encountered were redesigns, and even though they looked good aesthetically, the underlying usability problems plaguing these sites and hindering their success are problems we’ve seen year after year.

Read the full article: My Site Looks Great…But it Still Doesn’t Work!

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]]> http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/2009/03/12/businessonlines-optimized-newsletter/feed/ 0 Skittles Social Media Experiment http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/2009/03/02/skittles-social-media-experiment/ http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/2009/03/02/skittles-social-media-experiment/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:29:16 +0000 Jegan http://www.jeganchen.com/blog/?p=3 If you enjoyed reading this, you may also like: ]]> There’s been a lot of buzz recently regarding the new Skittles.com website, and their creative use of social media websites and user generated content on Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, and YouTube.  Check out the blog post I co-authored with Thanh for our Usability Blog, Re:Cognition.

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