Re: [Usability] Special Open Source Issue of Interactions Magazine

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

Hi Lennart,

On Tue, 2007-01-16 at 03:32 +0100, Lennart Borgman wrote:
[...]
> Antoher of my favorites when it comes to usability is my frustration 
> about the continous wheel inventing. One time when I installed GNU/Linux 
> everything went very, very fine -- until I should login and start using 
> it. I had no mouse on that system. I tried Ctrl-Esc, the Window Keys, 
> Ctrl-Alt-Del and everything else I learned from my MS Windows 
> experience. Nothing of it worked.
> 
> I never got to test GNU/Linux on that system because of that. Too much 
> waste of time. Of mine and a lot of good developers that had worked hard 
> to get the system to me. It all failed because of that reinvention of 
> the wheel. Was it Alt+F2 that I should have hit? I am not sure, but I 
> believed I heard that a month later. However I do not care, I do not 
> want to learn that. Why should I? Instead I tried to get my point 
> through to the developers and usability groups working with GNOME: Try 
> to let the user use their experience. Even if they have experiences from 
> the big EVIL MS. Do not bannish the users for their experience. That is 
> just not the way forward!

There are often good reasons why keyboard shortcuts are different to
those on Windows. In the case of the Windows key, I believe the reason
it's not used for the Applications menu (which you can access with Alt +
F1) is because some of the platforms which GNOME can run on don't
traditionally use keyboards with Windows keys. Not everyone is switching
to GNOME from Windows! Note that many of the keyboard shortcuts on Mac
OS are different too.

Apart from Alt + F1 and Alt + F2 (the Run dialog), I don't think that
there are very many other differences. I do agree that the changes can
be confusing, though.

In GNOME, the recommended shortcuts are defined in the Human Interface
Guidelines [1]. If you do find problems navigating in GNOME with the
keyboard, please file a bug in the bugtracker [2].

Thanks,

Phil

[1] -
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input-keyboard.html
[2] - http://bugzilla.gnome.org/

-- 
Phil Bull
http://www.launchpad.net/people/philbull