Has anyone else noticed that the HELP key is so near to the DELETE key? This drives me absolutely nuts. Today I may have actually growled. It doesn’t happen often — maybe once or twice a month I hit the HELP key when I want to delete and then I have to wait while the Help window opens. Once or twice isn’t bad considering I am a lousy typist. But it’s enough to make me swear out loud, disrupt my train of thought, and potentially put me a bad mood. In my book, it’s akin to the JUNK button living right next to the SEND AND RECEIVE button in Microsoft Entourage. How dumb is that?
Frustration — the avoidance of such — should be the number one things to strive for when designing for usage. On a website, when opening a home page suddenly blares music (why? WHY?), or navigation forces the user to hunt and hit dead ends and backtrack in order to finish a task, or [[insert your "favorite" website annoyance]]. Why do designers opt for features that will undoubtedly annoy users? I can only surmise that testing wasn’t done. But can it really be that they don’t know? Seriously? (Do I do this? Please email me if I do. Seriously.)
But back to my keyboard. I have to love my keyboard. I touch it all day long. That’s a relationship. Mine is the old Macally iKey (pictured above). I love the pressure of the keys and the angle — everything about it, except for the problematic proximity of the HELP key (which I never use), to the delete key, which — like the center of the space bar — no longer has finish on it. I realize that the extended keyboard is a standard and Macally didn’t decide to put it there, but I challenge some maverick product designer to be brazen enough to think outside the box on this one and consider updating that which is established, but not working so well, and put the HELP key elsewhere, like Siberia.
What bugs you?
5 Comments
My keyboard peeve is the CAPS LOCK.
How easy is it to hit the CAP LOCK when reaching for an “a”…and then have the next series of letters all be capitalized? Arrrgh!
Two Macs ago, I had a user-developed software patch that changed the keyboard so that the only way to turn on CAPS LOCK was to do it simultaneously with the SHIFT key.
I’d love such a patch again. Does it exist for OSX 10.5?
Proximity is my problem, too!
I use a mac and find the icons on the doc just a wee bit too close together, so I often accidentally click on and open the wrong program, which inevitably takes forever to load, and then to quit….If I have the option to select the size of the icons, why not the amount of space between them? Or am I so computer illiterate that I don’t know how to?
What bugs me about websites is when the “home” page is nothing more than a fancy book cover–you know the sort without any content, but you have to wait, and wait, and WAIT for some stupid graphic that dances to download and dance before the “enter here” button will appear. At that point the “Next!” button has already been engaged.
Oh, I’m so totally with you there, Elizabeth! I am not a fan of the splash page. I also abhor when music automatically loads on a site. If I’m going to a musician’s site, well, I should expect that, but any other site I cannot stand it and I will immediately go elsewhere.
I think my biggest vice is the tab/cap lock keys. I’ll go to tab something and end up with the caps locked. And when typing really fast, like I tend to do, it can create a huge mess.
The biggest issue I have with keyboards is one of my own doing: Cats. How is it they know how to pull things up on your comp that you didn’t even know existed?
On websites, I have to agree with the above issues. Music, too much flashy stuff, long download times…yup very annoying.
Sorry I haven’t been around much lately.