Unified user experience

I am using computers with text based and graphic user interfaces for more than 30 years now and would like to share my experiences.

Desktop environments like Windows, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, etc. are all trying to unify the user experience by providing a set of common patterns that all applications belonging to that system abide by that. Glued together is this by providing different means of manipulating the layout of application windows and ways to navigating between them. The standard ways are inolving a lot of mousing, clicking and Alt/Strg/Win+Tabbing until the wanted Window pops up. Additionally if you are using a lot of applications chances are, that you have to deal with a chaotic collection of different paradigms and GUI toolkits. This is bad, but it also is reality.

Modern computer usage involves a lot of navigating inside and between applications. Unifying this behaviour is near to impossible, because people. So next best thing is to adjust the system and all the commonly used applications to behave in a similar way. This is what I am trying here.

Global usage patterns for navigation

  • Navigate between workspaces/monitors
  • Navigate between Applications
  • Navigate between Application Windows
  • Navigate inside the Application

There are some shortcuts that are ideally the same between applications:

  • Strg+f: Find stuff
  • Strg+Tab: Next tab
  • Strg+Shift+Tab: Previous tab

A criterion for the usability of an application is also the ability to tweak the shortcuts in a way that it fits into global usage patterns.