“What’s the keyboard shortcut for ‘Delete’?” In Spacebar, no one can hear you scream

“Where’s the ‘spacebar’?”

I’m leading a training course and I have just instructed my class to press the aforementioned key on their keyboards. One of my trainees cannot find theirs. Maybe it has fallen off.

OK, ha ha etc, but is that really such a daft question? Not everyone is comfortable with keyboard terminology. Just because you know where to find your ‘tilde’ and ‘fada’ keys doesn’t mean your average Jane is familiar such jargon. For her, what I call a ‘spacebar’ could be just ‘space’ or ‘word-space’ or ‘gap’, and she thinks I’ve asked her to look for some sort of ribbon ‘bar’ on-screen. And trying to sort this out is really difficult when you’re training remotely.

Except on this occasion, I’m not teaching pensioners, Siberian farmers or visiting Martians, but journalists.

You’d expect people who use a keyboard throughout the day, for pretty much every working day of their lives, to have some faint understanding of what to call the various big, flat button things on the rectangular plastic hedgehog sitting in front of them. But no.

“It’s the wide key you use for typing spaces between words,” I advise gently. “It’s shaped like a bar. It’s the ‘spacebar’.”

[Ten seconds of silence]

“It’s the biggest key on your keyboard, right at the front,” I insist. You can’t miss it. Well, obviously you can but it’s definitely there, honest. Have you found it? Good, well done. Remember, there are no silly questions, only poorly phrased answers – and bad trainers, ha ha!

“Now let’s move on. Please hold down the ‘Shift’ key and…

“Yes, ‘Shift’. The key you use for typing upper case letters. Capitals. [Indicating with my hands even though my webcam is muted] Biiiiig letters.

“Ah, I see what the problem is: you are pressing the ‘Caps Lock’ key. Yes, I know that gives you capital letters, but I’d like you to press the ‘Shift’ key. It’s right next to ‘Caps Lock’. Yes, with a fat arrow. You always wondered what it was for? Well, now you know. Ah, well spotted, there’s another one on the right. You learn something new every day, eh?

“Good, now tap ‘PageDown’…

“‘PageDown’? OK, remember when I told you about the arrow keys? About three minutes ago? Yes, I appreciate that it’s a lot to take in at once. No, I don’t think this is a “completely different” keyboard to the one you have at work. The one at work looks “blacker” does it? I see.

“Anyway, have you found the arrow keys? Good. Just above it is a group of nine keys, two of which have labels on them reading ‘PageUp’ and ‘PageDown’. Found them? Excellent, well I’d like you to…

“Which one of them is ‘PageDown’? OK, look at them again. Can you see one of them is labelled ‘PgDn’? That’s short for ‘Page Down’.

“What’s that? Everything’s “going crazy” on your screen? Ah yes, I see. You can let go of the ‘spacebar’ now… The ‘spacebar’… The wide, bar-shaped key at the front of your… No, that one…”

And so it goes on.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy training and the trainees usually enjoy a bit of banter, but it can be exasperating to meet someone who evidently has never shown the slightest measure of curiosity in the tools they’re given at work. Some years ago, when I was still running courses to retrain QuarkXPress designers to use Adobe InDesign, I was amazed to discover that some of them had never fully explored the QuarkXPress program menus or tool settings.

Me, after learning QuarkXPress as a youthful trainee in 1988, I read every help screen, pored through both manuals (a reference book and a how-to user guide, both ring-bound) and investigated every tool, menu command and dialogue window in the program. But the professionals I was now training hadn’t even looked beyond File > Open, File > Save and File > Print.

“What do you do when you need to change a setting?” I’d ask them.

“We’d call Helpdesk,” they’d reply.

Even so, I doubt they’d call Helpdesk to ask where the ‘spacebar’ is. I’m sure you’ll let me know in the comments below if you have heard otherwise.

You see, back then in those heady, early days of what they called desktop microcomputing, I suspect many people already had some experience of typing on a typewriter, as I had – at school. If you think a word processor margin ruler is mystifying, you really ought to have a go setting predictable left and right margins on a typewriter.

Learning to type on a typewriter was physically as well as mentally demanding: holding down ‘Shift’ was akin to operating a car jack and adding carriage returns was effectively a form of weight training. I suppose it focused your mind on what the keys were for. In 1988, no-one ever wondered what a ‘spacebar’ was or where it might be. You’d be pressing it 10,000 times a day, and by Christmas you could crack open hazelnuts just with your thumbs.

As software got cleverer, users lost interest in the tools. Some of the graphics software I teach now provide a menu command for inserting a wordspace character – you know, to save you the trouble of having to hunt around for the largest physical fucking key on your keyboard. Perhaps I should show trainees how to assign the ‘spacebar’ as a keyboard shortcut for this command.

Is that such a daft idea? After all, computing ought be flexible enough to fit around the user rather than the other way around. If user norms change, what’s the point of harking back to tried, trusted but universally hated old methods?

In my first job as editorial assistant on a magazine, I ended up (through a series of circumstances too boring to recount here) being responsible for producing the company management accounts, using Lotus 1-2-3.

[A form of spreadsheeting software once favoured by boomers, m’lud.]

Unfortunately, the quantity of data was too big to fit on the tiny bit of free space left on the squeaky, bad-sector-ridden 20MB hard disk in the IBM clone I'd been given, so I had to keep each month's data on individual 5.25in floppies. I then wrote a precarious macro that prompted me to swap out the diskettes one by one as it calculated YTD against budget and updated year end forecasts for each business unit, then printed out report sheets, charts and graphs for the monthly financial meetings.

It all worked OK until someone suggested I could produce prettier charts and graphs by pushing the data through the woeful Lotus GraphWriter. Since I didn’t know any better, I went along with the idea, only to find that it applied its own fiercely dogmatic rounding logic, producing pie charts whose percentage-labelled slices invariably added up to 102 per cent.

But Lotus 1-2-3 itself was great – under DOS on a green-screen monitor, no mouse, keyboard commands only. Even if someone had lent me a mouse, there was no menu bar to click on. You had to remember all the commands by heart. Slash File Retrieve [/fr], anyone?

The conventional history of software user interfaces tends to depict the pre-mouse years as something like the Dark Ages. But you have to wonder… is it the other way around? Most commercial software involves clickerty-clicking the mouse 42 billion times to do not very much. Only after a long apprenticeship with the program wielding a mouse do you begin to learn some keyboard command equivalents to make your job quicker.

It’s not for nothing that what we once called “keyboard commands” are now referred to as “keyboard shortcuts”. But as with Lotus 1-2-3, such shortcuts were simply the way the program worked. In the pre-mouse days, you learned the fast, efficient and expert way first.

To be fair, software back then came with manuals. You could look stuff up and learn it. These days, you’re expected to muddle your way around by yourself or ask for help in a user forum.

Software developers just assume their UX design is so intuitive that everything must be obvious. Well, no it isn’t, tossheads. Your software is shit and it’s getting harder to use with every shit update.

Even expensive, best-in-class software forces users to wander aimlessly around freakishly arcane graphic user interfaces, hovering over stuff in the expectation of a tersely inarticulate tooltip or right-clicking on things and hoping for the best, like some fucked-up business edition of Riven.

With all software being so mouse- and touch-centric, it’s inevitable that familiarity with key-entry input is on the wane. There are no ‘Shift’ keys as such on on-screen keyboards on a mobile phone, for example: what you have is a single ‘Caps Lock’ key that deactivates itself after you type a character (unless you press it twice, etc).

Basically, I’ve been barking at my Gen-Z trainee to press a key that she had literally never seen or heard of before.

Still, this doesn’t explain why the ‘spacebar’ should be so elusive. But I think I’ve found a solution: I demonstrate how to call up an on-screen keyboard like the one on a mobile phone. Pretty soon, everyone is entering text into their computers by clicking on their on-screen keyboards. The actual physical keyboards in front of them are forgotten.

I bet you think I’m joking.