Designing keybindings to be easy to learn and resistant to forgetting even when the set of commands is large

Authors:
N. Walker;J. R. Olson
Affiliations:
Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor;Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Venue:
CHI '88 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
1988

Citing 2
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Abstract

We formulated a set of rules for producing key-commands that are alternatives for activating commands with a mouse from a menu. Because software is getting increasingly complex, it was important that the rules cover a wide variety of commands. The rules combined verb-modifier-object order and mnemonic abbreviations for the words in each slot. Our keybindings were shown not only to cover a wide set, but to be far easier to learn than EMACs (a common keybinding set) and a more robust form with respect to negative interference from prior and post-learning of another set.