Cyberpunk 2077 frustrates me because during the intro cutscene it says “Press B to skip” but you can push any button to skip it. Then on the title screen it says “Press <START> to continue” and you have to press start.
It’s actually good UX practices to do this. You light up a path to get a result (pressing the start button to continue to the menu), and then a large segment of people will continue to press start, even if they’ve previously stumbled upon the fact that any button will work
It’s like picking a home server in the fediverse. You can tell them it doesn’t matter what they pick, but a lot of people will be intimidated and nervous about having to make the choice. It’s a major problem for adoption
You also don’t have to tell computer minded people inconsequential rules, they’ll figure it out themselves pretty quick
So by choosing an arbitrary button for the instruction, you remove a meaningless “choice” that genuinely lowers the friction for a large chuck of the population
There are also people who, if you tell them to press any key, they will happily mash the function keys and be confused and upset that unexpected things are happening
There’s even a select few who will physically look for the any key every time just to make sure it’s not suddenly been added to their keyboard, and there are even the special few that will hit the power button and get angry because they think you’ve caused them to break their computer
Some of these people have higher degrees too…I didn’t believe it until I saw it for myself
I will happily press the function key and then say “aHAH” when it doesn’t work. Then I’ll press a key I know will work.
Thank you!
*presses power button*
I don’t even know which button is supposed to be start.
Don’t forget “press any key” but only 1 key works.
When I was a kid I spent like an hour looking for the “any” button.
I genuinely got stuck the first time a system asked me to press F2, having never seen a function key row before.
Me, an intellectual:
