Creating a Pleasant User Experience - Part IV: Many ways to do the same thing

Giving your users many ways to do the same thing may seem like you’re making your application more complex. From a developers perspective, that is true… but from a user perspective it’s not.

Some users like to use their mouse for everything. If they can’t click it, it doesn’t exist. Others use their keyboard for everything. If they have to navigate to something with the mouse, it doesn’t exist. You should keep both of these types of users in mind when you’re designing your application.

Like I said, this does add a little extra complexity to your code. But if you’re smart about it, and if you use a good object oriented event driven development platform, the cost is pretty minimal.

Let's say, for example, that your application has some dialog that gets shown.  You want to give your users the ability to open that dialog from a menu, a context menu and a keyboard shortcut.

First you create your generic event that handles the display of the dialog. Then you just wire the specific events for your menu item and your context menu item and your keyboard handling event to use that single piece of code. This way you only need to make changes and fixes in one place, but you give your users three paths to the same dialog.

One more thing… always test your tab stops!  I always forget to do this and it always comes back as a bug at some point.

Kind of a short one today. I’ve got one last one for tomorrow about helping users troubleshoot their own issues – especially ones that are not your applications fault – and also getting good debug information for yourself or your support staff.