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Comment by CarolineW | Hacker News Reader

How do you know? How can you be sure you reach every slide simply by pressing space?

What about on my tablet, which doesn't have a space bar?

Edit: These are genuine questions, and I am deeply frustrated that it's being downvoted without any discussion. People are claiming that hitting the space bar takes you linearly through the entire presentation. How do you know you reach every slide like that?

Really, seriously, how do you know?

As far as I'm concerned the navigation is opaque - if I hit space, I don't know that I'll reach every slide.

How do you know ?!?

I suspect that people are enamoured with the attractiveness of the presentation - it's cool, it's slick, it's gorgeous, it's wonderful - and when I question its usability or discoverability, people are downvoting because they have no answer, and just get pissed off at being questioned.

Do you actually have an answer? If so, tell me.

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You have raised a very important issue here. Today's web has been festered with such sucking UI/UX. It just caters to the demands of novelty-seeking users with no concern for usability/discoverability.

> It just caters to the demands of novelty-seeking users

Not even sure if users or just developers and website owners. As in - oh man, that looks so cool, let's do that!

Indeed, you made a very sharp statement. It might be driven, to a very large extent, by the crazy novelty-seeking ideas of the website owners and devs.

Then if some equally stupid "journalist" gives praise and publicity to their foolish UI/UX this trend increases and perpetuates. Unfortunately, it seems to be happening to a very large extent. The irony of this article is that it talks about security, and calls for anti-bloat things.

I understand you will not be happy with this answer but, you know what keyboard shortcuts do by looking at the knowledgebase:

http://help.slides.com/knowledgebase/articles/235434-navigat...

Look at the compass rose in the lower right corner. When there's another detail slide below, the down arrow is dark. If you're at the bottom, it's grey. Basically you're navigating a grid and the arrows tell you if the cell in that direction is populated or empty.

I'm not totally sure if moving sideways pops you back up to the top row (which it should) or to the equivalent depth of the neighboring stack.

I actually really like this style. It allows you to quickly skip across the top row to get the main points, then dive deeper when needed.

Thanks for the reply - useful, but it continues to raise questions.

By looking at one of the slides, is what you've said obvious? How can you tell? From the start it's not obvious to me that there's a grid of slides. It seems to me that you need to experiment to work out how it works, and it's really not obvious. You yourself say that you don't know if moving sideways pops you back to the top of the next column.

In short, it's all taking my attention away from the presentation, it's making me work to figure out what's going on, and it's just not obvious. Ask yourself if this is a good thing - making your audience work to figure out how the presentation works, taking them away from the content. It's swish, it's fancy, ...

... it's obscuring the actual content.

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