Enhancement Request: User Menu UI Shortcuts for Notifications

UX
1

###Enhancement Request: User Menu UI Shortcuts for Notifications

My main workflow with Discourse forums is to display the User Menu (aka Profile Menu?) to see changes (notifications) to my subscribed topics.

####Please enhance the UI to make it easy to use keyboard shortcuts to view, select, and display each item on this menu. My preference would be these:

  • “p” – display/hide the User Menu (this already exists)
    • Actually I’d prefer “u” (for User) or “m” for member, but I see “u” is already used for “back” (I don’t get the connection between “u” and “back”).
  • “UpArrow” and “DwnArrow” – move the selection up and down the menu
  • “RETURN” – display the selected item/post

I have read that “TAB” and “SHIFT-TAB” are provided for navigation of the menu, but I have two issues with that:

  1. It is not reliable. Sometimes TAB moves the focus in the web page, sometimes in the menu, even while the menu is shown.
  2. IMO, most users would expect the arrow keys to work for navigation here, like in all menus. Although technically it may not be a “standard” popup menu, to the user it appears as if it is a popup/dropdown menu/list.
  3. When the User Menu is displayed, I think it is reasonable that the user would expect the primary navigation to be focused on the menu/list, not the web page.
  • So if the user wants to navigate the web page, a simple “p” will close the User Menu

Many thanks for your kind consideration of this request.

2

One thing we could do is set focus a bit better after p is pressed.

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Another navigation aid that would be really helpful, is that when the user types “p” to show the “user menu”, it automatically sets the focus to the first item (notification) which has NOT been viewed.

Then a simple RETURN would display the post.

2 Likes