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Comment by a-dub

8 hours ago

last time i built a crud app (oh maybe about 24 years ago) i made it a point to do this. i remember watching the payroll people fly through their terminal mode vax vms applications with such speed and dexterity that it would make any unix admin well versed in the art of the command line blush and it made me think "oh yeah, all these 90s point and click guis got it all wrong. if people are required to make heavy use of a system at work, they would prefer a learning curve followed by speed, comfort and dexterity over an easier learning curve that trades dexterity for discoverability."

it was a webapp framework, but... all browsing/listing screens included row ids and a focused text box- so that typing the row id and enter would select. all action buttons had an underline to signify which ctrl-shift hotkey triggered them. all edit screens defaulted focus to the first editable textbox and at no time was the mouse actually necessary. finally, load times were optimized to target 75ms.

amusingly, the user feedback was "the keyboard control is pretty good but can you please make it faster."

what i thought was chrome ended up being critical to the users not being miserable.