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My name is Marcin Wichary (he/him). I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.

More info about Unsung

Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:

More info about Unsung

Google Docs shortcut onboarding

A nice, but unpolished onboarding callout directing people towards a more useful shortcut, in Google Docs. I’m holding arrow keys without ⇧ here first, then with ⇧:

To improve it, I would add some sort of small celebratory “completed!” state, and auto-hide it afterwards; right now, it seems that it hides on a delay, likely regardless of what happens.

(Testing onboarding is hard because once it’s invoked it disappears forever. If you are worried about onboarding experiences in a place you work, please insist on easy toggles to bring it back for testing. And no, one-size-fits-all “reset onboarding” is too crude; ideally you can reset each specific one easily through a simple UI.)

Thank you to Ezra Spier for the tip.