The Command Line Experience

The Process

First, I wrote a script in Google Docs of the entire process of creating an application. This was based off the UI work that was previously done. This script helped determine the keyboard actions necessary for the design.

Next, I presented the script to the engineer, explaining the necessary keyboard actions. The actions we needed were up, down, select, remove, back, quit, multi-select, etc. They came back to me with a few frameworks for building terminal applications. After evaluating the frameworks, we agreed on using a framework called Bubble Tea.

It is useful to have experience with using the terminal, Vim, or coding when designing terminal applications. I used commonly used keyboard actions for most of the actions, so that users won't have to think much on how to navigate the application (ex. q for quit; x for select/unselect).

The biggest challenge was that some keyboard actions were off-limits because of actions reserved for the terminal. For example, I couldn't use up and down arrows, to move through a list of tests. Instead, I choose to use 'j' and 'k' because these are used in Vim to move from left to right or up and down.

The design was delivered via Google Docs. This included the keyboard actions and carefully proofread prompts for each step.