Feature (UX): Ensure learnability by offering hints

[sjjh]

Learnability is an important part oft UX/usability. Especially if a user uses a software seldomley (as it normally runs quietly as a service in the background).
The psychological phenomem/heuristic "recognition rather than recall" is relevant here. One example: instead of letting the user memorize key combos, show them to the user.

IMHO this becomes more important once more interactions are possible, e.g., manually cycle through widgets, calling a widget just once (e.g., showing IP address) and then falling back to widget displayed before, using widgets that offer interaction (e.g., counter, alarm, stop clock, ...).

Some ideas:

• on cmd provide usage info via -h and in a man page
• UI overlay to show usage info
• small GUI system tray application to provide usage info and settings dialog (instead of config file only)

Note: Usanility depends not only on the task/goal, but also on the context and in the user. Defining the (target) user can help to prioritise features (e.g., man page vs. GUI dialog)

[sjjh]

I was also thinking about default key bindings, if more key combos are added. As the ALT modifier is used in many applications, probably not too many combinations are left until running in conflicts. I was wondering if fn plus any other key, normally not used in combination with fn (.e.g., 1 or q) could work to have some global options available.