[HN Gopher] Show HN: An experimental, keyboard-first user interface
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Show HN: An experimental, keyboard-first user interface
Author : dschramm
Score : 81 points
Date : 2020-03-20 18:26 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (emvi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (emvi.com)
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think the solution should be to use the "accesskey" attribute.
| Unfortunately, not enough web page writers use it.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Wow I actually never heard of this! I will definitely consider
| it while implementing more features of Emvi in our new UI.
| dschramm wrote:
| Hello HN!
|
| We just rolled out this little MVP for a new user interface for
| our knowledge base software.
|
| I would love to hear what you think about it!
|
| Cheers, Daniel
| bluemooner wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this! I find these kind of articles very
| interesting, as they go really deep into the analysis behind
| product development. As for the feature itself, as other people
| have already mentioned, I think it depends on whether your
| users are more accustomed to GUIs or CLIs. Personally, I prefer
| the latter so I'm definitely biased.
| dschramm wrote:
| We are trying to present GUI users with good arguments for a
| switch. Our tests with people that are unfamiliar with CLIs
| showed they were up to speed after a short amount of time.
| the_duke wrote:
| A big issue here are mobile/touch devices.
|
| You don't want to force your users into keyboard driven
| interaction there.
|
| But as decent mobile support is almost a requirement nowadays
| (even if just inside the browser), you end up with two
| completely different interaction designs and would require
| users learning everything twice.
| dschramm wrote:
| That's definitely something we have to look into. We
| currently see mobile usage primarily for searching and
| reading and less for creating content. But you are right,
| this needs special attention. We do not want to maintain two
| different approaches.
| nadima wrote:
| Interesting, particularly useful for power users and high
| frequency usage products.
|
| Have you researched which applications have the highest
| penetration of keyboard usage and why? Afaik most users even on
| desktop apps (e.g MS office suite) can only retain a handful of
| shortcuts. What's your strategy to train users to have a fully
| keyboard based navigation?
|
| Btw did you use any open source library to manage keyboard
| shortcuts?
| dschramm wrote:
| We have not found any reliable numbers on keyboard usage vs
| mouse input yet, but it would be quite valuable.
|
| Compared to normal shortcuts the commands are easier to
| remember, because they mostly represent the verb for the
| action you want to accomplish. Instead of memorizing Ctrl + E
| or similar for a new article, you type /write or an alias
| like /new. This way you only have to know what actions are
| possible, without connecting them to an inconclusive key
| combination. Most commands will auto-complete after the first
| two letters, so you are not losing that much time either.
|
| Our frontend is build on Vue.js and the shortcuts are handled
| by global JS events.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| I understand you will like this if you like command line
| interfaces.
| marvinblum wrote:
| We showed it to some people who are unfamiliar with command
| lines and they liked it. It's just that most non-technical
| users never encountered an interface like this, but they do
| like it if you show them how it works. This is why we're
| going to add an interactive tutorial.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Please add a language selector so I can read the website in
| English. Or maybe lose the German localization altogether.
|
| As a German native speaker, I find the German translation quite
| difficult to read.
| marvinblum wrote:
| You can change that on the account settings page.
| https://emvi.com/account
| marvinblum wrote:
| In case you're talking about our blog, you need to change
| your browser language :3
| otab111 wrote:
| I'm very confused by the fact that this page itself does not
| have a visible focus style on interactive elements, making it
| very difficult for somebody who navigates the web with a
| keyboard to see what they are clicking on. I could not tell
| even if all the links on screen were actually reachable by tab
| key.
|
| Maybe I've missed the point, but there are people who use they
| keyboard exclusively when navigating a web page already, and I
| would think accessibility for those people would be a big
| consideration in what you are doing.
| dschramm wrote:
| You are right, I created a ticket for this to be fixed in the
| next release!
| httpsterio wrote:
| I like the idea and I would use apps like this in my own personal
| life, but as a UX designer this is also a super horrible
| experience if you don't give any affordance in the UI to the user
| indicating what type of action they can take.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Yes we've thought about that too. That's why we added
| autocompletion and we will add an interactive tutorial should
| we decide to commit to this.
| flyinglizard wrote:
| Not just auto completion but interactive auto completion
| coming from a list of options. This is what I did for one of
| my projects - you get a vertical list of all possible inputs
| (within reason of course) which is narrowed down as you type.
| You could use the arrows to navigate if you're not inclined
| to type - arrows - tab - arrows - tab would build a complete
| command sequence.
| marvinblum wrote:
| This is exactly what we did.
| dschramm wrote:
| I agree, that's one of the challenges we have to tackle. The
| commands being contextual to the page you are on helps in my
| point of view, but we have to explore ways of onboarding users
| in a proper way.
| Groxx wrote:
| Seems we might be giving it the hug of death. In case it renders
| weird / 503s:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200320200023/https://emvi.com/...
| marvinblum wrote:
| Hm everything is looking good so far. We'll switch to a more
| powerful machine anyway soon ;)
| marvinblum wrote:
| Just in case, here is our Medium blog:
| https://medium.com/emvi
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| For (relevant) prior art, see Notational Velocity (which appears
| to have successors in various states, nvAlt and nvUltra).
|
| There's also Alfred, Quicksilver and Enso
| matlin wrote:
| Additionally, Superhuman seems to be doubling down on this
| approach for their productivity inbox and VS Code has this type
| of input/UI available with Cmd-P. Spacemacs kind of does this
| when helping you navigate emacs modes.
|
| It's a fantastic marriage of traditional search box feature
| discovery and keyboard shortcuts.
| marvinblum wrote:
| These are the places where we got our inspiration from :) But
| we couldn't find any relevant attempts to implement something
| like this in a browser, especially for non-technical users.
| philjohn wrote:
| I worked for a company that made software for libraries (public
| and academic). It evolved over many years, starting off as a
| terminal session onto a mainframe.
|
| The newer windows version still kept every single keyboard
| shortcut, because it turns out once you know the shortcuts, it's
| so much faster than pointing and clicking.
| marvinblum wrote:
| Yeah I really do love that. Once you get a grasp on it, you can
| control it blindly. I'm so quick on our UI right now, that you
| sometimes don't even see the command line opening. I think this
| efficiency combined with modern design has great potential.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Developers paying attention to keyboard shortcuts is a fit-and-
| finish metric. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's a good
| indicator of whether the developer actually cares about their
| users.
|
| Windows itself did a great job of keyboard shortcut consistency
| through Windows 7. Windows 8 and beyond, however, have been
| less so.
|
| Pressing ALT-F4 while Windows Explorer has focus on Windows
| Server 2019 and finding that you're rudely logged-off with not
| warning (which has _something_ to do with UAC settings, and can
| be replicated on Windows Server 2012 R2 w / the "Desktop
| Experience" feature enabled) gave me a very "Gee, these guys
| really don't care about me" kind of feeling. There are others,
| but they're not coming to me right now.
| marvinblum wrote:
| This is probably happening because it takes a lot of effort
| to get a keyboard controlled interface right. When everything
| is controlled by mouse you can separate concerns more easily.
| We had to put some thought into our state management which is
| even harder in the browser than it is on the desktop.
| nemoniac wrote:
| An excellent keyboard-first interface exists already. It's called
| Emacs. Give it a chance. It might surprise you.
| CarlRJ wrote:
| Vim
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Web sites tend to be created for novice users, because users come
| from everywhere all the time, and tend to not stick around for
| long enough to get competent on your design. (Really, on how many
| sites can a user get competent?)
|
| I guess it's time to reexamine the reach of assumption, but I'm
| sure it will stand correct more often than wrong.
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| Not 100% related but a fun thought experiment I've been
| thinking about. What if all these various online marketplaces
| (Amazon, Shopify, Weebly, Wix, eBay) had the _exact same
| interface_ functionality? Themes might be different but
| searching, sorting, comparing, and buying were standard across
| the board, like NPC shops in video games.
|
| I feel like it would lead to a significant increase in sales,
| due to the decreased cognitive load of figuring out yet another
| shitty interface. Mix in seamless payments and account
| management, and the idea of an online store starts to disappear
| entirely, to be replaced with the ability to just... buy stuff.
| dschramm wrote:
| Interesting thought, I would love to hear the leading UX
| designers of those companies discuss their ideas, desperately
| trying to settle on a solution they all like.
| dfee wrote:
| "What if there was only one way to buy things", "then 100% of
| things bought would be bought through that one way".
|
| If you eliminate differentiation you are eliminating
| friction, but also innovation.
| tomcooks wrote:
| It's inevitable, the very core nature of markets will
| inevitably lead to either one single player or an oligarchy
| of players using shared strategies
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| Fair point.
|
| Maybe it can better be phrased as,
|
| "what if online marketplaces published their data in an
| open format allowing the end client to display them however
| the user prefers"?
| the_other wrote:
| You mean like CSS Zen Garden?
| all2 wrote:
| Or via Styx/9p2000. Could you imagine an online store
| that mounted directly into your operating system? There
| would be a whole market of GUIs.
| jborichevskiy wrote:
| http://www.csszengarden.com/214/
|
| Neat project - thanks for mentioning. Definitely in line
| with what I'm imagining.
| marvinblum wrote:
| I agree, but Emvi is a knowledge management tool and if you
| decide to use it, you usually stick around for a while. So our
| users should have time to learn it. And I think it's really
| intuitive already.
| taeric wrote:
| Worse, web sites tend to be written from a position of derision
| regarding most novice users.
| chickenpotpie wrote:
| I've had an idea for a while now to have a website that only has
| a text input like this to allow simultaneously building a website
| and a voice assistant (Alexa/Google Home) plugin. The development
| is much faster because it's the same back end for both apps,
| gives a standardized UI, and the auto fill on the website teaches
| what is possible on the voice assistant.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| Always good to see companies put some effort into good keyboard
| navigation!
|
| If you want a keyboard-first interface for your web browser I can
| recommend Vimium (which I'm sure a lot of you have already heard
| of). I'm not actually a Vim user (at least not yet), but I rely
| pretty heavily on Vimium's shortcuts in Firefox nowadays. I
| started using it when I had a school-provided laptop which had an
| awful trackpad which was way too slow and annoying to use for my
| taste.
|
| Vimium: https://vimium.github.io/
|
| Screenshot of shortcuts in Vimium:
| https://i.imgur.com/x1Y7OvQ.png
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Let's bring back gopher and use this as an interface.
| achillean wrote:
| Not sure if joking but Gopher is alive on the Internet today
| (281 results) if you wanted to create a new interface and test
| it w/ real data:
|
| https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A70+gopher
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(page generated 2020-03-20 23:00 UTC)