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Comment by jtraffic | Hacker News Reader

In my view, there are many insights like this to be had by physically studying product users a bit more. The startup community has built a strong habit of studying users before a new solution is adopted, but not as much after.

The insights designers get from just watching someone use a product are always delightful. The idea is basically ethnography for design. (https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyc...)

'Desire lines' in parks are one example. Desire lines are the paths in the grass that get worn down because people use them even though the designer didn't plan for it.

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Keep in mind there's evolutionary momentum at work here, too. The standard uses of F1 and F2 especially that are at play in the discussion here date back to some of the earliest PC tools. Volkswriter supposedly used F1 for help as far back as 1982, and it was standardized in the 1987 IBM Common User Access guidelines (which also standardized things like F5 for Refresh before web browsers burnt that shortcut in all our brains): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

So it is very hard to trade-off the momentum of a three decades old standard just to delight particular subsets of power users.

Not to mention the other side of it: why was help so slow and aggravating? Were there ways to make it non-modal and faster. Unsurprisingly, that's been the focus where Office has tried to make an impact, trying to speed up Help and make it less obnoxious over the years, rather than change up a three decade old keyboard shortcut.

They could have acknowledged that F1 is "help" and really slow / annoying, so putting a much useful function onto F2 was probably a bad idea. They could have put what F2 did onto a different shortcut.

For instance, they could make F2 something that was infrequently useful and unintrusive, then made F3 do what F2 did. So if you mispress, you don't do the even worse F1 thing.

Again, per the link prior: this standard predates even Office itself. They could have not followed the standard, but then they would have angered users for not following standards used elsewhere in PC applications at the time.

F2 has long been "Rename Object" and F3 has long been "Find" (though Excel in this case doesn't use it for that, but that's another matter). Did IBM do enough user studies at the time? I'm not sure IBM could have found a user study to predict the order of those choices being irritating to Excel users two and half decades later.

Even then, too, the IBM CUA I pointed to was partly synthetic, pulling in commonalities from apps at the time of its writing. Given F2 is nearly universal as "Rename Object" [1], I've got a feeling it predates the IBM CUA by quite a bit in some heavily used applications, but I'm not a historian.

Office never existed in a vacuum, and the function keys have had common meanings for decades. Microsoft used a mix of the IBM CUA guidelines and presumably what they were seeing from the competition (Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc especially for Excel early in its history). If they put the useful function of F2 somewhere else, they would have broken the muscle memory of so many other PC users, even early in Excel's history. If they moved it today there might be riots, some rioting even by the same people removing F1 keys from keyboards.

[1] You can see it on this chart and compare it with most of its neighbors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_keyboard_shortcuts

One thing to keep in mind is that some of these shortcut keys predated the modern AT-style keyboard with the function keys across the top. They were introduced way back in the day of the original PC keyboard with function keys in two columns at the left. F1 and F2 were side by side at the top of these columns, and they were very easy to distinguish from each other and hit reliably. F2 was just about the easiest function key for a touch typist to hit.

http://www.vintage-computer.com/images/83key.jpg

http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibm_pc.shtml

The cynic in me says most startup types would witness this behavior, snort derisively and say "they're not our target market".

Or "you are doing/holding it wrong!!!".

Damn it, i have had a prominent FOSS DE guy basically claim that users are idiots after studying the results of a usability test of their DE.

For me, in the trenches, it is more that users find their own ways of doing things. And if it works for them it works for them, and we have no business correcting them.

Who was this and what DE was he working on?

What DE? You can't leave us hanging like that, we're not chads and this isn't Election2000.

When my dad was doing some UI work back in like the late 70s, maybe early 80s, for call-center workers no one knew how to do UI yet. But he quickly realised that if you put people in a room and asked them for their feedback after using it for 20 minutes, what they told you would become useless when you actually deployed the software. So he pushed to have the software implement recording features like how long a person is on at which page and which page they went to next. I'm surprised more people don't do that even today when it shouldn't be that much of a technical challenge. Just "here's a trial copy of the software: use it for two weeks and come back to us with your data."

>So he pushed to have the software implement recording features like how long a person is on at which page and which page they went to next.

These days, we call this "telemetry".

>I'm surprised more people don't do that even today...

Because telemetry is seen as evil. Remember how WMS is praised for collecting this data in Windows 10 to make a better product? Yup, me neither.

The irony is, of course, that every web-based product has these stats built-in. Facebook is known to gather this exact data, for example.

As a side note, it always gets me when people whose PC usage is 99% on the web complain about "telemetry".

Well, I think it matters if you have the knowledge and consent of the participants, whether the data will be used to produce a proprietary profile on the person, whether that data is sold, and if participants are compensated for participating in a market research program.

Agreed. When I worked at a newspaper, my most valuable contributions by far were ones made after spending a day with a reporter, ad designer, etc. and talking with them about their daily routine.

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