Keypress Navigation
As designers try to make their designs more intuitive, it is no surprise that
websites are becoming more responsive. Not only does this apply to user
interfaces in modern Web applications (which are becoming as robust as
desktop applications — and often smarter), but with the wide adoption of
JavaScript libraries, “classic” websites are becoming more robust and
interactive, too. One way to make websites more responsive is through
“keypress navigation,” which hasn’t been widely adopted so far. But lately
we’ve observed more designs implementing this effectively. The most
popular setting for such navigation is on photo websites such as Flickr or
FFFFound.
The general idea is to give users keyboard shortcuts that help them
perform tedious tasks, such as navigating between blog posts, moving
through images in a slideshow, changing the current view (e.g. from a
horizontal to vertical grid), liking articles and navigating between sections
of a website. Keypress navigation is common in Flash-based designs, but
we are now seeing it applied to CSS-based designs, too. Google Reader is a
prime example of advanced keypress navigation, but other websites have
good implementations, too.