GNOME Keyboard Shortcut Survey

The GNOME keyboard shortcut survey is an exercise that is taking place as a part of the 2010 Google Code-in. The aim of the survey is to identify those applications or areas where different shortcuts are used for the same functions. This is to ensure that each part of GNOME is consistent and therefore easy to use.

Instructions for researchers

Researchers are to construct a spreadsheet which records the shortcuts for each GNOME application by function. The following indicates the kind of format that should be used:

'HIG' refers to GNOME's 'Human Interface Guidelines'. This describes how GNOME interfaces should look and work. The section on keyboard input contains recommendations for which shortcuts should be used for which action.

In this example, there are no problems with the keyboard shortcuts for 'Cut', since each shortcut is the same. There is a problem with the shortcut for 'New Tab', however: those most applications use 'Ctrl+T' for this action, Gedit uses 'Ctrl+N'.

There is no need to record every shortcut in every application. Just record the ones that are common to multiple applications. The HIG page that is linked to above provides a good place to start for these, though it does not contain some actions ('New Tab' is not included, for example).

The applications which should be included in the survey are: Nautilus, Gedit, Epiphany, Rhythmbox, Tomboy, Calculator, Sound Recorder, Eye of GNOME, Evince, Cheese, GNOME Terminal, Evolution, Yelp (the help browser and viewer), Baobab (disk usage analyzer), File Roller.

Creating the 'compliant', 'non-compliant' and 'N/A' columns is an additional task which can be completed if there is time.

Results

The survey findings should be provided in a commonly recognised spreadsheet format, such as .ods, .csv or .xls.

Contact

AllanDay is the primary Usability Project contact for the survey. He is available on IRC should researchers have any questions.