Hunt and Peck: An Investigation and Proposal for Better Custom Keyboard Shortcut Management in OS X

By Matt in OS X, Constructive Criticism, Design, Commentary, Usability

The short story: The interface and functionality of custom keyboard shortcuts in OS X is awkward and unreliable. There are two possible direct reasons for this — Apple’s development priorities and non-standard application resource organization — and any number of underlying causes. I propose a solution.

This is the very long story. I am primarily a Camino user, but like anyone developing for the Web on a Mac, I usually have Firefox and Safari open at the same time too. My keyboard shortcut habits were formed in Firefox, though, and it’s too late to switch from ⌘+K for the search box, and ⌘+⌥+← and ⌘+⌥+→ for tab navigation. Having acquired a new laptop recently, I was reminded just how awful the process for setting up custom keyboard shortcuts is in Mac OS X.

Of Mysteries and Ellipses

If you’ve set custom keyboard shortcuts before, this interface will look familiar. In fact, it remains unchanged since OS X 10.3.

The problems here are manifold.

First, you have to find the exact name of the menu option you want to access. This requires switching back and forth between an open application and the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, with nowhere but your mind (or a piece of paper, or a Sticky, but come on) to store the title of the menu command, which is itself potentially buried several levels below the top-level menu options.

This is further complicated by the fact that keyboard shortcuts don’t take effect until you’ve closed the very application you were getting the menu option from. (It doesn’t say that anywhere in the interface itself; you just have to come to that conclusion by trial and error or Help when it doesn’t work immediately.) Even if you remember whether, say, that app capitalizes “to” or “from,” there’s no way to assure you’re typing the right thing. The best example of this is the ellipses, used to denote a menu option that triggers further action in a dialog box.

Can you spot the difference?

Here you go:

Apple specifies in the HIG section on Style that menu options requiring further input or confirmation should feature genuine ellipses:

Important: Be sure to create the ellipsis character using the key combination Option-; (Option-semicolon). This ensures that an assistive application can provide the correct interpretation of the character to a disabled user. If you use 3 period characters to simulate an ellipsis, many assistive applications will be unable to make sense of them. Also, 3 period characters and an ellipsis do not look the same because the periods are spaced differently than the points of an ellipsis.

But just because something’s in the HIG doesn’t mean developers will abide. Firefox is a great example. A sample custom shortcut:

And sure enough, it matches up:

This is problematic.

Of course, it’s known that third parties aren’t the only ones who don’t adhere to the HIG. The “Search Google…” menu option in Safari, pictured above, raises a few tangential questions: Does it even deserve an ellipsis? It just quietly puts focus on the Google search bar, which I didn’t notice until I’d tried selecting it a few times. The neglected HIG doesn’t account for menu items that do things like that. Hidden as it is, this menu option in Safari almost seems to exist for the sake of being custom-shortcut’d.

Assuming you do get the menu command title right, there’s no guarantee that setting the custom shortcut function is actually going to work. I spent twenty minutes trying to set keyboard shortcuts in Safari and wondering why they would show up sometimes but not others. In the end I had too many screenshots to deal with. I think this one, taken after I attempted to create a shortcut for “Private Browsing,” will suffice:

Some sort of type-ahead mechanism that would fetch the right menu command for you would solve this problem, but that brings us to why this functionality isn’t already built-in.

Not a Key Feature

Obviously, making the custom keyboard shortcuts interface eminently usable is not a priority for Apple. For the most part, only a minority of users actually know and use keyboard shortcuts. Of those I bet a significant number desire at least some level of customization, but at the end of the day, it’s not a feature that moves units. It’s understandable, then, that it hasn’t been prioritized.

I initially suspected another reason: that improving the process would actually be quite difficult. Here’s why.

While it’s possible to get a complete list of the menu options of any running application with Applescript, it would be best if the preference pane didn’t need to run the application just to get the menus. So instead, providing a searchable list of default menu options for an application (dynamic things like the bookmarks and history in a web browser should be ignored) would require a registered list thereof for every available application. But do these even exist? If so, where?

Turns out they do. But “where” is exactly the problem.

In many applications (both Apple’s and those by third parties), the default menus are found in the MainMenu.nib interface file of an application. See for yourself: ‘Show Package Contents’ on the Safari application, navigate down through Contents › Resources › English.lproj › MainMenu.nib. If you’ve got Developer Tools installed, you should be able to open that file. You’ll see in the MainMenu.nib window something called “MainMenu,” an object of the NSMenu class, which manages an application’s menus.

Theoretically, a list of menu options should be obtainable from this .nib file. Unfortunately, it’s not always in the same place. For Calculator, it’s in Calculator.nib instead of MainMenu.nib. With DVD Player, it’s in MenuBar.nib. For Mail, I couldn’t even find it. So the preference pane wouldn’t know where to look without loading the application to tell it. Right?

Wrong! The location of the MainMenu-containing interface file is specified in the NSMainNibFile property of a given application, listed in the Info.plist directly inside the Contents folder of every application. Knowing this, it’s easy, for instance, to find the appropriate .nib for Mail, MailViewer:

Peachy Key’n

I’ve leave the implementation for another day, but all of the pieces are already there. The Keyboard & Mouse preference pane can already tell when an application disallows keyboard shortcuts:

And it knows that because — and here’s the kicker — it checks the Info.plist file! Check it out:

If a property exists to disallow keyboard shortcut customization, we can only assume that the list of available applications listed in the Keyboard & Mouse prefence pane is drawn from a cached list of applications whose menu commands can be edited. It wouldn’t be too far a stretch to get Keyboard & Mouse to then cache a list of the available commands from the MainMenu object in the appropriate .nib for each safe application.

The interface for finding the right menu command should work just like the new Help menu in Leopard. The screen would dim and a facsimile of the selected application’s default menus would appear. Start typing a command, and the close matches would be pointed out visually with the bobber. Once you’d selected a command (by searching or by manually navigating through the menus with the mouse), the command would fly from the menubar into the preference pane, where you could set a keyboard shortcut for it which would then be checked against existing shortcuts.

Click for a larger view.

A warning dialog indicating that changes to existing keyboard shortcuts wouldn’t take place until the application was restarted would then appear, offering, like Software Update, to quit said application immediately or postpone quitting.

It can be done. It should be done. The ball’s in your court, Apple.

See Also

John Gruber’s article Losers, Weepers speaks to the problems of the OS X custom keyboard shortcut feature, and was written way back in 2003 when the feature first appeared. (There are a lot of similarities there, but it’s worse that the problems haven’t been addressed in four years than me not remembering John’s original post.) He mentions a key problems not mentioned or addressed here but just as vital — the lack of conflict management.

This Is Important. Do It. Now.

By Matt in User Science, Commentary, Business

We received an email from the Wall Street Journal recently as part of a campaign to encourage their subscribers to complete a survey. Everything is wrong with it, and it’s a great example of how not to solicit feedback from your customers.

See for yourself:

First, there are some obvious but minor offenses: The visual design is terrible. What’s with the bright blue text? And the light blue background on the logo? If you’re going to send HTML email, do it with style. And couldn’t they have merged our name into the form letter? But there are some more fundamental problems here which we’ll address.

Dear Newspaper,

Please pay attention to these rules of user engagement:

Be polite.

It’s a no-brainer, but people respond much better and more often when they’re addressed nicely. Being blunt and businesslike may be an efficient way to do business, but when you’re bargaining for your customers’ valuable time and giving them nothing for it, you should at least butter them up a bit.

Ask or encourage, don’t demand. “We’d appreciate it if…” or “Would you like to help us…” is much better than “Please do this.” Note that the word ‘please’ here doesn’t do anything to make the request polite — it just makes it sound even more superficial and curt, since everything else about the letter screams rudeness.

Write from my point of view.

This letter is all about what the WSJ wants, and it operates under the completely erroneous assumption that what I want corresponds with what the WSJ wants. Ha.

I, quite understandably, want my business to be successful, want to finish this last piece of code, want to respond to these emails, figure out why my USB hub isn’t working, finish writing this blog post, to get to the bank before it closes, and to make a quick dinner. I could care less what the WSJ wants. This letter is like the annoying friend who comes whining to you when they, very reasonably, get fired for being late every day and losing an important file one too many times, but who isn’t there for you when your mother dies. The WSJ is asking me to do them a favor out of the goodness of my heart, but they don’t even bother to acknowledge that there is, without a doubt, a hundred more important things of my own that I could be doing.

How could this be improved? Simple: ‘We understand that you’ve probably got more important things to do, but completing this very short survey can really help us improve our service to you.’

Offer reward.

Why should I spend ten minutes on your survey? What’s in it for me? How about $10 off my next year’s subscription? This rule is the more concrete corollary of the previous one.

If there’s no promise of anything but a “Thank You!” page waiting at the end of your survey, don’t expect heavy participation.

Sometimes, even the illusion of reward is enough — automatic entry in a drawing, for example. People know they probably won’t win your sweepstakes, just as they know the chances of winning big at a slot machine or on a lottery ticket are small, but there’s a chance, and everybody loves chances.

Don’t deadline.

Your users are busy people. Giving them a deadline and expecting them to complete your survey by then is just asking to get ignored. It sounds imperious and as if you don’t care at all about the fact that the recipient probably has many other deadlines that they consider far more important.

Of course, there does have to be a deadline — you need to cut off submissions and aggregate the data eventually. Handle it like this: First, set it more than eight days in the future (much further, in fact). Second, just don’t tell your readers when it is. There’s no need to create a false sense of urgency with brusque statements like “Please complete it by October 22nd.”

Make it quick.

Ten minutes is a long time, and exactly the sort of length that seems too long to bother with. And it’s probably not even accurate. Anything above two or three minutes is actively discouraging participation.

If your survey does take more than a few minutes, though, there’s no reason to lie. Like the deadline, just leave it out your estimated time. Better to risk people leaving in the middle of a survey than not starting it all.

Explain yourself.

Why are you conducting this survey? “To help improve The Wall Street Journal” is too vague. What about your services are you improving? Why should I care? Again, this ties in with writing from the recipient’s point of view and thinking about what’s in it for them. Just referring to your survey as an “important project” doesn’t necessarily make it one to me. You’ve got to convince people what you’re doing is important, and every bit of communication you have with your customers is a valuable opportunity — make the most of it and don’t make them regret they gave you their attention.

If all you’re doing is running an annual survey to ensure the relevancy of your advertising and there’s really nothing interesting or exciting about it, well, there better be some nice prizes.

And besides, everybody loves to talk about advertising — you might be surprised at the responses you get by allowing your users to sound off about it.

Be brief.

You can be friendly, honest, and sufficiently explanatory without being overly verbose. Leaving out details like deadlines and completion times can help. Ask nicely, offer reward, and let people do your survey on their own time, on their own terms.

The rest is results.

Two Leopard Bugs

By Matt in OS X, Design, Commentary

The application switcher occasionally darkens an (apparently random) application’s icon, as though it were being clicked on in the Dock.

And Mail won’t fix the color of quoted text. I suspected it just wasn’t changing rich text that was black, but it does the same to plain text:

Here’s to 10.5.1!

I’ve Reached My Limit: Approaches to Character Limit Cutoffs

By Matt in Design, Commentary, Usability

In real life, it’s important (and polite) not to obtrusively interrupt someone when they’re in the middle of something, and, of course, this carries over to website usability as well. So, how should we enforce form field character limits without disrupting what is already a potentially demanding process? I can think of two main use cases, distinguished by the length of the form one is filling out.

When filling in a small field like the zip code field featured below, users should be cut off at the character limit. It prevents error preemptively, before the form has been submitted. In most cases, users know why they can’t go any further because of the nature of the input (i.e., a phone number, credit card VIN, or age). If it’s unclear, some explanatory text will do the trick:

With larger text fields> (<textarea>s) we have to be more forgiving. Users can’t keep count of characters in their head (if they even know what a ‘character’ is), and it’s relatively likely that they’ll be looking not at the screen but at the keyboard, or at another window, or even at notes on their desk while typing. In this case, it’s dangerous to just stop accepting input. They may continue typing without actually accomplishing anything and not realize it until they’ve wasted time typing something they may not remember.

Thankfully, there are two real-world examples that I think demonstrate exactly how to get character limit enforcement wrong and how to do it right.

Twitter: “No — No Further!”

Type more than 140 letters into micro-blogging platform Twitter’s What are you doing? box, and you’ll be stopped without warning. If you’re not paying close attention to the box, you could go on typing without knowing what’s happened. If you’ve something longer than 140 characters to say, this quickly becomes frustrating. Because the field is frozen as soon as you hit the limit, any mid-sentence editing you want to do to whittle down your little tweet becomes an exercise in frustration. It can only be destructive, because you can only add or move words within the 140-character limit — any potential revision would have to be preceded by the deletion of something you’ve already typed and may not want to lose.

There is a nice numerical counter of the characters remaining, even nicer because its visibility — and, therefore, our awareness of the limit — is increased as you draw closer to zero.

But unfortunately it’s not enough to allay the problem. Okay, so I can see the words running out in front of my face, but I’ve already formed what I’m going to say in my head. Making the message fit their size constraint mid-thought isn’t my primary objective; I just want to type it all out and pare it down after. I respect the brevity inherent to Twitter, but it’s not something I’m really used to yet, so let me reorganize my words if I need to.

And what if you type your tweet somewhere else and paste it in to the Twitter website? Well, if it’s over 140 characters, you’ll have to guess how many you need to delete, because there’s no telling by how many characters you’ve gone over the limit.

And what’s more, you lose the end of the paste — what if you want to remove something that was in the middle?

How could this be handled more smoothly? Let’s see.

LinkedIn: A Polite Reminder

If you type too much in the contact form of professional networking site LinkedIn, you’ve much more leeway:

Instead of letting you proceed no further, LinkedIn simply tells you by how many characters you’ve exceeded the limit, allow you to easily pare down your message.

I think Twitter’s character counter should reflect just how far you’ve typed past the limit and not impose a character limit on the text box itself, much like LinkedIn used to do.

One area where I believe both approaches succeed is the size of the input area. Both LinkedIn and Twitter feature small text boxes, tailored to the exact amount of words they should (theoretically) contain. At first it may seem like an annoyance, but it’s a fantastic way to encourage concise writing and remind users of the limits.

Acknowledgments

This post was at least partially inspired by the work of usability guru Luke Wroblewski, whose presentation Best Practices for Form Design (and upcoming book, no doubt) contain guidelines very similar to these (see slides 105 and 106 in particular).

iKeepForgetting: Two Things iTunes Won’t Remember

By Matt in OS X, Commentary, Usability

Two reports on odd behavior in iTunes. For you. For Apple. For Google. For us.

iTunes Forgets View Preference Upon Clicking Altered Arrows

This is something you have probably never experienced, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

If you reverse the default action for your iTunes arrows — that is, change one of the iTunes hidden preferences to make the arrows redirect to your library instead of the iTunes Music Store — iTunes will always go back to list view, even you’ve set it to display album artwork. I’ve taken a short video to show you what I mean.

The first time I click is the default behavior — redirection to the iTunes Music Store. Going back to my library, all is preserved. The second time, though, when the arrow’s behavior has been altered, clicking the arrow lists the entire library centered on the song I’m listening to and forgets that I had set the view to “album art” mode. It’s slightly annoying.

Of course, this is a hidden preference, so it’s completely unsupported, and I don’t imagine Apple is too eager to help me avoid their Music Store by fixing it.

The second issue, though, is one you may have run into.

iTunes Forgets Scroll Location when Leaving Library View

Are you using the “Browse” viewing mode in iTunes? You know, the one activated by this button in the lower right-hand corner:

It activates the display of scrollable columns of artists, albums, and maybe genres above the list of tracks — convenient if you have hundreds of unsorted genres or more than a dozen artists or albums. Unfortunately, if you’re anywhere in the middle of those scrollable lists, you’re going to lose your place if you leave the library window. I’ve made a video demonstrating this as well.

Now that just doesn’t make any sense. Has this bothered you? Have you even noticed?