What I want to do is to focus on the power posters, firstly because I'm biased as I fall in that category, and secondly the learning curve of using any efficiency aids in this area probably don't make it worthwhile to expose this to infrequent visitors. A lot of this is as much about identifying any annoyances associated with the user interaction during posting and overcoming them, as much as anything else.
An example here from me was the (perceived) lack of shortcut keys to accelerate editing. Personally when I have both my hands on the keyboard typing I hate having to switch one hand to the mouse and therefore prefer to use keyboard shortcuts (e.g. Ctl-B for bold, etc.). So let's look at the shortcuts that phbBB provides on the posting form (thanks to the web developer toolkit)
- u — User Control Panel
- l — Logout
- b — Bold
- i — Italic
- q — Quote
- c — Code
- l — List
- t — ListBullet
- p — Image. Why this one is p is beyond me. Surely this would be far more usefully to Preview?
- k — Save
- (none) — Preview
- s — Submit
- h — Board Index
- z — Go to page footer
- t — Go to page top. This is ignored on this page since it is a duplicate of ListBullet.
| Edit: See Firefox 2, Access-key and close tabs configuration to see how to do this. |
I think that my last big bitch is a farce that you need to go through to type a fully qualified URL into BBcode. For internal board references having smart tags [Topic=n] and [Post=n] would help but given that the clipboard supports rich text, it would be really nice to have some form of smart clipboard paste which had a minimum understands links, bold and italic emphasis and automatically converts these into account the BBcode compliant text through a shortcut key V say. (BTW, the quickest way that I have found to pick up the fully qualified link of a topic/post in format is to hit the Private Mail (PM) button which throws you into the mail posting form and the URL is the first line of the post text ; you can copy this, then hit the back-arrow key to go back to the post.)
So where is this going? My first thoughts were that I would need to write a Firefox extension to implement some of this. Having now looked at this, if we sort our a couple of the shortcut keys, and work out how to do some smart pasting — then document this in an easy to read format for posters, we will have made a good step forward in usability.
Comments?
| Edit: Fixed title |
Not that i mind it, but I didn't expect such frivolity here. 
I never log out. Too much trouble.
