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Comment by zzo38computer | Hacker News Reader

I think they make valid points (they really do describe the problems with many modern UI that I see, and that many older ones are much better), but they did miss a few things, such as:

- Having keyboard commands is helpful.

- Good documentation is very helpful; a program is understandable if it is documented.

- Some of the difficulty seems to be due to the programming environments and libraries that are used for making these programs; due to badly designed UI libraries and programming environments, the result will also be bad. However, this is not the only thing that can cause these problems.

- On a computer it should also be helpful that the operator is able to make other external programs and can interact with them too, with your software. Command-line programs, user configuration settings, API, etc, can also be helpful in doing this.

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> Having keyboard commands is helpful.

Not just having keyboard commands, but using standard ways to make them discoverable, such as by tooltips, menu item annotations, and underlined characters in labels.

Another aspect in today’s UIs is that they often introduce latency in operations (due to network communication, among other things) while not buffering keystrokes accordingly, which makes it borderline impossible to press memorized sequences of keyboard shortcuts in quick succession, because you always have to double-check that the application is in the right state to receive the next keyboard shortcut. That goes against developing muscle memory for frequently performed operations, and forces a conscious back and forth and constant ascertaining that the command was correctly received by the application, instead of being able to blindly trust it and thereby reduce cognitive overhead.

> which makes it borderline impossible to press memorized sequences of keyboard shortcuts in quick succession

My favourite is the Windows password dialogue. If you start typing before it appears, your keystrokes are lost.

Even worse, in my opinion, is when you're typing away and a dialog from some other application suddenly decides to pop up and swallow all your key strokes; or, in the worst case, one of your key strokes just happens to coincide with a shortcut key on the intruding dialog so you accidentally accept something without having a clue what the dialog was and what you accidentally accepted.

OS should prevent any dialog from a background application from coming to the foreground of it detected that use is in the process of typing. It's not that difficult of a task after all.

[Edit: auto-incorrected text]

> Having keyboard commands is helpful.

Having some place where they are described is ... priceless. MS keyboard commands: press ALT (bangs head)

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