Generic Commands

Generic Commands - by Jakob Nielsen

Generic commands are a set of commands also known as keybord shortcuts, that work and can be used in most of the softwares avaliable today on the market.

There is a set of three genneric commands that I will use as an example to ilustrate this.

Copy, Cut, and Paste.

This is the most famous example of generic commands. These 3 basic commands suffice to let users do everything from move text to edit movies.

Guidelines for generic commands are:

• If at all applicable to your domain, your application should support the super-generic commands that people expect and know from other applications.
• In particular, provide cut-copy-paste commands for moving stuff around.

The cut-copy-paste triad wasn't the original generic editing command set. The original designers at Xerox PARC used move-copy-delete.

Benefits of Generic Commands

Generic commands have three advantages:

• They are ubiquitous, so users will expect to find them (and will look for the commands without being prompted to do so).
• They are consistent, so users will know how to use them.
• They replace many commands that are more specialized, so users have less to learn.

Currently, the only generic Web commands that truly work are those in browsers rather than on individual sites. Examples include Back, Forward, and Print.