I’d like to throw my mouse away.

Strange thought but hear me out.

I am not really serious. The whole world is too attached to their mice, but this is what I would like to achieve: to be able to drive all applications from the keyboard with out having to resort to moving my right hand 15 cm to the right to grab the mouse to have to click on a button or menu item because there is no other way to activate the action.

As I mentioned in my recent UI Musings post there should be several ways to achieve the action I want to achieve: Menu item, button and shortcut key.

This is all very easy to achieve and it annoys me when applications don’t provide shortcut keys. It annoys me even more when the same action has a different shortcut key for the same action on a different screen.

This is even achievable even with a web application. Look at Google. Reader, gmail, calendar and a host of others provide shortcut keys for the most frequently used actions. This makes for ease of use and enjoyable user experience. Granted some of these shortcuts take a little while to learn but once you get them down it makes for faster navigation.

Some of the banking sign in applications I use have nice little JavaScript code to automatically move the cursor from one field to the next when the 2 characters it is expecting are filled. This simple thing make using those applications a joy.

These things are the 20% that remains after the 80% that matters has been completed. They are ‘nice to have’ but they sure do make applications easier to use.

Technorati Tags: Usability, notFlashy

5 Things you (probably) didn’t know about me

Ha!

What happens when you see your entire blogroll has gone nuts doing this whole ‘5-things’ thing? You can just see it coming.

Thanks Thomas for tagging me. So for your reading pleasure here goes…

1. 30 kangaroos used to live in my back yard. OK, so the back yard in question was 3000 acres and they lived in the bush paddock at the far end of the farm. They are such graceful animals in full flight.

2. I am a university dropout. I dropped out of an Architecture degree before later doing a information technology degree. My results were much better the second time around.

3. I have performed for royalty. When I was younger, oh so much younger than today, my high school took a musical on a tour of the UK doing about 20 shows in about 25 days. At one of those shows Prince Edward, who was then the arty royal working for the Really Useful Theatre Company, was in attendance.

4. My favorite musical is Les Mis.

5. As for sport I am passionate about cricket and cycling to the exclusion of pretty much every other sport including football aka soccer, AFL aka Aussie Rules or footie, rugby (both codes), basketball or anything really. The Ashes and those three weeks in July are the top of the sporting calendar for me. Roll on 07-07-07 when Le Tour leaves from London.

Ok Alvero and Demian consider yourself tagged.

Technorati Tags: Cricket, Cycling, London, Music, 5 Things