The Philosophy behind Shortcutless Menus and Buttons in OS X

I was wondering what is the philosophy behind the decision of not having shortcut keys for menus in OS X.

Have you looked in the menus? There's tons of them. They're all over the place in both the OS and applications. You just don't need to press one keystroke to first access the menu before you can enter the command in that heading. If you want to open a file in an application, just press Command+O. No need to press Command+F (Control+F in Windows) to open the File heading before you can type the Open command.

It's actually much faster in OS X since you don't have to call a menu heading before you can type the shortcut within the heading. You go straight to it. Assuming there is a shortcut assigned to what you want.

In the shortest explanation, OS X isn't Windows or Linux. Every OS has it's differences. You need to unlearn what you have learned (boy, does that sound like Yoda!).

They do.

Check the menus of most Apple apps - Safari, Mail, iTunes, etc. Most menu options have a keyboard shortcut listed. They are typically accessed with the Command key.

If you are using a third-party application that has no keyboard shortcuts for menu options, that is the fault of the developer who wrote the application.

To increase your productivity. Keep in mind that Apple had the first graphical user interface. Windows was just a rip-off about 5 years later. Even then, using the mouse was very foreign to Windows users for another 5 years. Windows users needed a template of "keys to press" in order to operate their computer. Sometimes they would affix an actual keystroke template (5 rows deep) above their keyboards so they knew what keys to press. Gnome and KDE just copied Windows.

Xerox and Apple were the only companies that did meaningful research in human-computer interaction and developed products from that research. They discovered that if a user had many options to choose from, they had to pick which option to use each time. Even if they knew the interface intimately, they still had to mentally make a choice. Having to make all those choices actually takes longer than having a single option.

Still, users complained. So Apple, being a company that cares about its customers as well as its research, added command key shortcuts for only the most popular commands. Unfortunately, Apple has lately lost a bit of focus and is becoming more and more like Windows with a proliferation of shortcuts and contextual menus and right and middle clicks. There is objective evidence that shows that, in the grand scheme of things, all these options just confuse people and make computers harder to use.

You can assign a keyboard shortcut for any menu item you want using the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences pane.

If that's not good enough, you can navigate through the menus using the keyboard: Control-F2 to focus on the menu, arrow keys to navigate, Return to select. For more options, search Mac Help for keyboard navigation.

I agree with what other posters have said here about the Mac OS being designed as a graphic-oriented environment from the start. That being said, you can press control-F2 to set the focus to the menu bar and control-F7 to navigate around window controls.

Behi wrote:
This violates an important principle of usability, at least as it is stated by Jakob Nielsen, a guru in the field of usability evaluation and heuristics: recognition rather than recalling how to use a feature of an app.

Jakob who? Never heard of him.
Apple Inc. #1 brand in the world

Without a menu shortcut key, I have to memorize all the menu item shortcut keys. While if menus had an easy to recognize shortcut key, I could just use the keyboard, jump to it, and perform my desired task more quickly.

And there are menu items that do not have shortcut keys at all, so the only way I can perform them is to press Ctrl+F2 and navigate to that menu item, menu by menu.

The idea is that you use the mouse to navigate the menu. With little or no effort, you will learn those menu items that you go to several dozen times a day. For the other ones, there is no need to learn them since you rarely use them. Just keep using the menu and mouse.

Sorry, but this topic was settled 20 years ago.

In OS X, menu items have shortcuts but menus don't. I was just asking what's the philosophy behind this design decision.

As I already explained, there are no menu heading shortcuts because you don't need them. If there is a shortcut assigned to a submenu function, you just press that keystroke without having to access the menu heading first.

This violates an important principle of usability, at least as it is stated by Jakob Nielsen, a guru in the field of usability evaluation and heuristics: recognition rather than recalling how to use a feature of an app.

Not to be rude, but who cares what Jakob said? One person's idea of how something should be done is not how everyone thinks it should be done. As has been mentioned above, Xerox invented the GUI with the PARC project. Apple refined it. Both used direct shortcuts without bothering with an intermediary key to get to the shortcut you want.

While if menus had an easy to recognize shortcut key, I could just use the keyboard, jump to it, and perform my desired task more quickly.

No merit to that argument. Since you don't know what the shortcuts are on a new program, you'd have to look either way, whether it was Mac, Linux or Windows to see what's there. If you want to know what shortcuts are available in a Mac program, just click on the menu heading and see which functions have a short cut assigned to them.

The textbook in my GUI class was written by Jakob Nielson. The textbook sucked, and so did the class. But that's beside the point. He is a recognized expert in the field; you don't have to work at Apple to know something about GUI design.

You can navigate around the menus with the keyboard, but it does not have the alt shortcuts like Windows has. Of course, not every item or even every app on Windows uses them. It's up to the individual developer to set those alt shortcuts. They may be set to totally unintuitive letters or not be set at all. With a large number of items in a menu, it can become difficult to set unique alt shortcuts for every item. And of course, in the end, very few people actually use them. Novice users generally navigate the menus with the mouse, and expert users usually know the keyboard commands for each item and don't use the menus much at all.

I don't know why OS X doesn't have this feature, but I suspect it has something to do with the way they're inconsistently implemented on other platforms, and how they benefit a possibly small subset of users.

Wade Peeler wrote:
The textbook in my GUI class was written by Jakob Nielson. The textbook sucked, and so did the class. But that's beside the point. He is a recognized expert in the field; you don't have to work at Apple to know something about GUI design.

If you want a real expert in human-computer interaction, look for the late Jef Raskin, Apple Computer employee #31. Anyone who is going to discuss GUIs needs to know Jef Raskin. You don't need to agree with everything he said (I certainly don't), but you do need to know who he was.

Jef was always acknowledged to very extremely intelligent, but a bit wacky. That is why Apple had him run start a little R&D project code-named "Macintosh".

Adding to that, note that Keyboard Navigation needs to be turned on in the Keyboard Shortcuts pane of the Keyboard & Mouse system preferences.

Seems odd to me, your question. Has Jeffrey Jones2 not answered it?

To go to the menu and then access your desired menu item is a waste of time and not productive. It is far better and more productive to memorize the shortcuts in the menus.

That said, it would be great if shortcuts were constant between apps. You have to spend some time mucking with the keyboard system preference to get this to happen. The hardest change to get used to was the increase/decrease font size, which for years has been:

shift ⌘ + '<' or '>'

Some apps still use this shortcut while others use ⌘ + "+" or "-"

Changing this shortcut is a pain because you also need to change any conflicting shortcut or it doesn't work.

OS 9 apps were much more consistent. The increase/decrease font size and 'show fonts' and 'show colors' were all the same in all the apps I used.

Kurt