Show HN: An experimental, keyboard-first user interface (opens in new tab)

Thanks for sharing this! I find these kind of articles very interesting, as they go really deep into the analysis behind product development. As for the feature itself, as other people have already mentioned, I think it depends on whether your users are more accustomed to GUIs or CLIs. Personally, I prefer the latter so I'm definitely biased.

I'm very confused by the fact that this page itself does not have a visible focus style on interactive elements, making it very difficult for somebody who navigates the web with a keyboard to see what they are clicking on. I could not tell even if all the links on screen were actually reachable by tab key.

Maybe I've missed the point, but there are people who use they keyboard exclusively when navigating a web page already, and I would think accessibility for those people would be a big consideration in what you are doing.

Interesting, particularly useful for power users and high frequency usage products.

Have you researched which applications have the highest penetration of keyboard usage and why? Afaik most users even on desktop apps (e.g MS office suite) can only retain a handful of shortcuts. What's your strategy to train users to have a fully keyboard based navigation?

Btw did you use any open source library to manage keyboard shortcuts?

A big issue here are mobile/touch devices.

You don't want to force your users into keyboard driven interaction there.

But as decent mobile support is almost a requirement nowadays (even if just inside the browser), you end up with two completely different interaction designs and would require users learning everything twice.

Please add a language selector so I can read the website in English. Or maybe lose the German localization altogether.

As a German native speaker, I find the German translation quite difficult to read.

Using slash ("/") for commands can slow down many users not on QWERTY keyboards because "/" requires one to press shift (e.g. QWERTZ or AZERTY keyboards)

I understand you will like this if you like command line interfaces.

Developers paying attention to keyboard shortcuts is a fit-and-finish metric. I'd even go so far as to suggest it's a good indicator of whether the developer actually cares about their users.

Windows itself did a great job of keyboard shortcut consistency through Windows 7. Windows 8 and beyond, however, have been less so.

Pressing ALT-F4 while Windows Explorer has focus on Windows Server 2019 and finding that you're rudely logged-off with not warning (which has something to do with UAC settings, and can be replicated on Windows Server 2012 R2 w/ the "Desktop Experience" feature enabled) gave me a very "Gee, these guys really don't care about me" kind of feeling. There are others, but they're not coming to me right now.

The fact that shortcuts have become less and less discoverable, and nobody has cared enough to educate users, is the cause of an incredible amount of lost productivity.

"User friendliness" is paternalistic and limiting. You want a learning curve that amplifies the user's power as they progress along it.

Yeah I really do love that. Once you get a grasp on it, you can control it blindly. I'm so quick on our UI right now, that you sometimes don't even see the command line opening. I think this efficiency combined with modern design has great potential.

If you're going down that route I recommend Qutebrowser[0].

I'm a pretty staunch advocate of it since it doesn't feel at all like a "hack" of vim in the browser, and because it's chromium basically all websites work. (However, I am contributing to the monopoly of chrome based browsers, which is a bad thing in my personal opinion).

It's also easy to extend, I think it's the ultimate hacking browser.

PS: it takes a little tinkering to get really nice looking on MacOS.

[0]: https://www.qutebrowser.org/

There are a couple of annoying things with vimium which, I think, are general limitations for Firefox extensions, or browser addons in general: - it loads after the page, so if you mistakenly open a link, you have to wait until the page is fully loaded to close it with the extension, but you can always use the browser's integrated shortcut Ctrl+W. So far so good - Letters positions are not as accurate as let's say, qutebrowser, and sometimes when you open a link it's not the right one, even if the letter was indicating it. For a clear illustration of what I'm trying to say, try to browse stackoverflow and use the reviews queue. - When the page is saturated, letters start overlapping, you find yourself with one link hovered by 'A' and another 'AA' maybe a couple of links labelled: 'AB', 'AC', ... and in this situation it's impossible to select the link 'A', you have to do it with the mouse.

>Custom search engines...

Firefox has had this feature for many many years.

I press ctrl+L (keyboard focus to location bar) type "w aviation" and press enter.

It's built in already as a default feature. To add a custom search to Firefox, right click on the search field and click "Add keyword for this search". I chose "w" for Wikipedia like you have.

> Always good to see companies put some effort into good keyboard navigation!

Yup. I'd also like to see companies put some effort into publishing a complete list of their keyboard shortcuts. How hard can this be? grrrr

I often find highly useful undocumented shortcuts by hitting the key combination by accident.

I have found tridactyl a great keyboard-driven navigation tool for browsers, with insane customizability. (Example - want to copy the git clone address into your clipboard? Just press `yg`)

Try https://hop.sh I launch it two days ago here on HN. It's a bookmark tool with a customizable search bar (like bangs on duck duck go)

Each style of user interface is obviously not going to be the best for every single person, but for people who are used to using a keyboard, and who interact with software for long periods every single day a keyboard shortcut focused interface could be much more efficient (and they are - ask anyone who does 3d modelling for a living).

Designing user interfaces for some hypothetical "average person" that's using it for the first time might make sense for consumer software that's sold to everyone for occasional tasks, but there's plenty of software that benefits heavily from having a bit of a higher learning curve in exchange for faster/more efficient interaction.

Is this true for anybody under the age of say, 40? I don't know a single person between the age of 15 and 40 who can't touch type at least 50 WPM.

I think the main hindrance for most people is not lack of touch typing skills, but more lack of ability or desire to memorize key bindings or the names of commands.

Not 100% related but a fun thought experiment I’ve been thinking about. What if all these various online marketplaces (Amazon, Shopify, Weebly, Wix, eBay) had the exact same interface functionality? Themes might be different but searching, sorting, comparing, and buying were standard across the board, like NPC shops in video games.

I feel like it would lead to a significant increase in sales, due to the decreased cognitive load of figuring out yet another shitty interface. Mix in seamless payments and account management, and the idea of an online store starts to disappear entirely, to be replaced with the ability to just... buy stuff.

Worse, web sites tend to be written from a position of derision regarding most novice users.

I agree, but Emvi is a knowledge management tool and if you decide to use it, you usually stick around for a while. So our users should have time to learn it. And I think it's really intuitive already.

I agree, that's one of the challenges we have to tackle. The commands being contextual to the page you are on helps in my point of view, but we have to explore ways of onboarding users in a proper way.

Yes we've thought about that too. That's why we added autocompletion and we will add an interactive tutorial should we decide to commit to this.

It looks a lot like the command palette of sublime, vs code, etc (cmd+shift+p). Combined with the navigate functionality of those editors (cmd+p). Where actions like back map to the command pallet and navigation like .articles maps to the file navigation.

Thank you! We're thrilled too by all the positive feedback and we'll continue to work on this :)

Additionally, Superhuman seems to be doubling down on this approach for their productivity inbox and VS Code has this type of input/UI available with Cmd-P. Spacemacs kind of does this when helping you navigate emacs modes.

It's a fantastic marriage of traditional search box feature discovery and keyboard shortcuts.

The thing missing from both those implementations is link following. That's the "HT" in "HTML" and "HTTP", so no supporting it from the keyboard seems almost unacceptable to me in a web browser. Yes, I'm aware that no major brower _ever_ did support link hinting out of the box.

I'm using Tridactyl now, and am extremely happy with it. There are some problems, notably on the lack of Tridactyl support before the page loads, but with TreeStyleTabs it is the best browsing experience I ever rememeber having.

Imho, the right approach is the one taken by qutebrowser, a lot of shortcuts yes, but it's almost impossible to only use the keyboard and, when you do so, you can't be as productive as when you use the mouse, because it wasn't designed for a keyboard centric use.

Hm everything is looking good so far. We'll switch to a more powerful machine anyway soon ;)

Good idea! We can bind that additionally to the Control + Space keyboard shortcut.

Wow I actually never heard of this! I will definitely consider it while implementing more features of Emvi in our new UI.

Not sure if joking but Gopher is alive on the Internet today (281 results) if you wanted to create a new interface and test it w/ real data:

https://beta.shodan.io/search?query=port%3A70+gopher

Vim

We are open for offers :D

I mean try pressing dot on your keyboard on any page in Jira