At univ, I get courses about interface design. Which made me think about one detail of our board.


It's about the posting forms (newthread/newreply/editpost).


Originally, Acmlmboard had a simple form for that. Textarea for the post, then Submit/Preview buttons underneath.


Then options were added for moderators:



Those are quick-moderation options, but other options may also fit there for everybody (disable smilies/HTML/layout and avatar selector).

Naturally, those go between the textarea and the submit/preview buttons. Submitting is the last thing you do, and you do it after having ensured you filled the form right.


HOWEVER!


Once that was added, moderators complained that it broke their workflow. They'd press Tab+Space to submit a post after writing it, and obviously adding controls between the textarea and the Submit button broke that (it would tick one of the option checkboxes instead).


So they fixed this by reorganizing the interface:



This is basically what we have, too. The aforementioned issue is gone, but the interface design isn't as good-- there are form controls coming after the Submit button, which is weird, unusual and inconsistent with the rest of the board.



There's a better solution: tabindex (wondering why they didn't just use that-- maybe not enough browser support back then)

tabindex is basically used to specify the order in which controls receive focus when pressing Tab.

So for example, you can make it so pressing Tab while in the textarea goes to the Submit button regardless of how the interface is laid out. Doing so would preserve the Tab+Space habit, but may be counterintuitive to new users (who expect Tab to just go to the next control).



So... dunno. I want to know what you guys think of all that interface shiz.

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