The third way we see great products surface shortcuts to their users is through a command bar. They even gamify the experience by color coding the shortcuts you've tried and the shortcuts you haven't. The first time you land in Figma, they prompt you to open their keyboard shortcuts guide.
#How to create global keyboard shortcuts on mac how to#
A keyboard shortcuts reference gives them a quick way to remind themselves how to do something within your product without having to remember where they need to go to do it.įigma is one of the best examples of a keyboard reference in action. This is especially useful for users when actions are nested deep within context menus or other hard-to-find places.
A shortcuts reference that your users can access globally (that is, from wherever they are in your app) is a good way to solve for this. While tooltips are a great way to surface shortcuts in context, sometimes your users will want a single view of all of the shortcuts available within your product. Here are two examples from products that do this well: Superhuman and Linear. This way every time a user hovers over a given affordance in your app, they're reminded of how they could perform that action without their hands leaving the keyboard. One easy way to get your keyboard shortcuts in front of your users is to use tooltips to visually bind them to their associated actions. If you want users to discover your keyboard shortcuts, return to them often, and become power users, you need to surface them to users where they'll find them.Īs far as we can tell, there are three ways great products do this. Great keyboard shortcuts are discoverableĪ user should never have to google for your keyboard shortcuts. Next we'll dive into each of these traits and discuss a few learnings from each that you can use in your own keyboard shortcuts experience. The user can use the key bindings without having to change settings in the product, the browser, or the OS. The key bindings chosen have built in mnemonics that help users learn them over time. Shortcuts are only useful to users if they know they are there. Great keyboard shortcut experiences have three traits in common. What makes a great keyboard shortcuts experience In this post we share our learnings on how to design a great keyboard shortcuts experience and a few resources we created along the way to choose key bindings that were memorable and conflict-free. We knew there were experiences we admired in other products, but we weren't sure which key bindings to use in our own. We faced the same question when we started to introduce keyboard shortcuts into the Knock dashboard.
Now let's say it's time to assign key bindings to the actions in your own product.
If you're building a product or a dashboard that users come back to often, keyboard shortcuts are a great way to improve their productivity and to help them become power users. Even with modest assumptions, simple math points to regular use of keyboard shortcuts saving us days of time a year. Keyboard shortcuts matter because they save us time.
(A note for our Windows/Linux readers: we'll be using macOS keyboard references throughout this post. If at any point in reading this post you get bored, you can press ⌘ + W to make it stop.
0 kommentar(er)
