Testing tip: Make your keyboard fast

I believe every modern operating system allows you to set the key repeat rate and the delay before first repeat:

By default, on a Mac, the initial delay is 500ms, and the key repeat rate 1000ms. You can adjust both:

• Initial delay goes from 250ms, to as long as 2s.
• Repeat rate goes from 2000ms (once every two seconds) all the way to a whopping 33ms (30 times a second).

On a PC, the shortest values are exactly the same, but Windows 11 only allows up to 405ms between key presses, and 1000ms of initial delay.

My suggestion is to make them both as short as possible for testing.

Why would that be helpful? There are two reasons.

First, it’s good to test whether your keystrokes behave well when repeated. Occasionally you might want your interface to suppress repeating, or do something special if the key is held longer.

Second, it’s a good test not just of repeating, but just the user pressing keys really fast. It’s very important for the UI to never make you wait for any animations or transition, and a lightning fast 30fps repeat rate is a good way to stress test your system this way.

Here’s me holding the Tab key in Figma at a standard key repeat speed:

It’s nice to see those transitions help you orient yourself as you’re thrown around the canvas. But look at what happens when I do the exact same thing with the key repeat cranked up:

The transitions are now slowing the UI so much that you can no longer see any canvas movement – the canvas only catches up when I release the Tab key.

The smooth movement assumed a certain minimum key rate, and perhaps wasn’t tested with a faster one.

There are of course ways about it, like speeding up the interactions, suppressing the transition smartly, or introducing a custom repeat rate if needed – I talked about it a bit in my essay about designing fast keyboard interfaces.

Here’s an example of an interface that suspends transitions at a fast keyboard rate and responds in real time:

This looks very chaotic especially since you’re not in a driver seat, but this interface is at least honest and doesn’t make the user wait. And it might not be pure madness – you would be surprised how fast people’s brains and fingers can react.

But first, you have to be aware of the problem, and I think setting up those key repeat values as short/​fast as possible will help you find more of those kinds of issues.

(And you might choose to keep those high speeds anyway in regular use, like I do.)

#flow #keyboard #tips