On Saving a Few Seconds with Shortcut Keys
Seth’s got a pebble in his shoe about drop-down boxes for choosing your state and country in e-commerce applications. I can see his point, but there is a solution. On all modern browsers, typing the first character of the state/country your looking for takes you to the first one option that matches that character. So whenever I see one of these, I type the letter c, then hit the down-arrow one time because I live in Colorado, not California (which comes first in the alphabet).
I know. He said “This is not a post about how stupid this is,” but I couldn’t help it. I’m a big believer in using shortcuts whenever possible. Computers have tons of them that most people never know about. It’s not their fault, of course, but I try to help them whenever I get a chance.
Here’s a good trick – unplug your mouse for a while and try to navigate without it. Use the alt key to activate menus, and alt-tab to navigate between applications. Notice and learn the shortcut suggestions next to commonly used menu options. After an hour you’ll be a master. I did this out of necessity about 10 years ago – my mouse broke and it was a few days before I could get a new one.
February 17th, 2005 at 10:51 am
You’re correct that shortcuts makes it faster to get the job done, hence the name shortcut. But, the shortcut you’re suggesting is a Keyboard Shortcut, which some people are not trying to use, for some reason.
That’s a good idea, to unplug the mouse. It’s also easier to tell people “Press Shift 4″ than “see the little button almost to the left of the screen”.
A solution for the long drop down menu, would be to list all! states, with radio boxes…