IBM Common User Access
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
There was a time when consistency and accessibility were primary considerations in GUI design. Sadly this value system was destroyed in two steps. First web eliminated the structure derived from platform frameworks that underpinned good desktop GUI. Then mobile sidelined the human-centric design thinking that derived from office ergonomics and turned the role of UI designer into “illustrator who draws pictures of apps.”
But then we moved into the GUI and everyone thought it was important not just to have the same shortcuts or even the same menu layouts, but literally the same design language in icon design. It trained people that switching platforms was much harder than it should be. In reality, noone is struggling with the web because of minor layout issues.
Consistency isn't king, good design is.
I weep often because I can see that people are making mistakes that make software less useable because they are either ignorant or arrogant and fail to uphold the guidelines that have been worked out over three decades of blood, sweat and tears.
Consistency is nice but it should never ever be done at the cost of any other features.
How do you know? Is there usability research to support this claim? Probably not, since practically no one does actual usability testing anymore. Product managers just slap something together and then start A/B testing to fudge the narrow metrics that they need for their performance reviews.
Ok, things get harder when we talk about shopping carts, logins, and other details, but even there not all good flows have to look the same in literally every way in order to be usable.
At least CNN still has lite.cnn.com as a low-fat alternative. (Slightly too slim, otherwise everyone would use it…)
I wish this had caught on. CTRL-X/C/V is okay-ish until you get to different platforms and/or need to use the terminal.
I also wish we'd have stuck to a clearer separation of which modifier keys apply to the OS/desktop level, which ones are app level, and which ones are text/input level.
Oh, absolutely.
A small mercy is that software on Linux never seems to use the Windows aka super key in shortcuts. So i set up my desktop environment such that all its shortcuts use super. It means i have a completely nonstandard setup, but at least it means there are no collisions!
Apps mostly steer clear of ctrl + alt + funky key combinations (ie not letters), so you can have those for locking, rebooting, etc.
But it would be lovely if this was systematic, codified, and standardised.
I mostly SSH to Linux, but when I use a Linux Desktop, I struggle to get the key bindings to my taste.
Here's an example on a Sun keyboard, labelled with a diamond: http://xahlee.info/kbd/iold51593/Sun_Microsystems_Type_6_Key...
It did. It's still available in Windows 10.
And it's what everyone used throughout the eighties and most of the nineties, until Microsoft copied the silly Cmd-X/C/V (only with Ctrl in stead of Cmd) from Apple for Windows 95 or thereabouts.
Which is why, 16 years ago, I took over that article and fleshed out a stub into something more descriptive, with examples and so on. :-) I'm rather pleased to see it on the front page of HN.
CUA is a lot more pervasive now than people appreciate, I suspect. It's what unifies the designs of KDE, Xfce, GNOME, LXDE/LXQt, Enlightenment, and so on. Mac OS X is closer to it than classic MacOS was. There are visible traces of it in Haiku.
In fact it's almost easier to point to UIs that don't have much trace of it -- aside from touchscreen ones. There are Oberon and A2,. There's Plan 9 -- but its successor Inferno is more CUA-influenced.