ux: usability pass — 3 fixes from Nielsen heuristics + Don't Make Me Think#91
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In the browser front-end the player could only act by clicking; the console and pygame front-ends both accept number keys to choose an option. A returning player who expects to press "1" to fish got no response, and pressing Enter to dismiss a dialogue did nothing — the web UI silently broke a convention the rest of the game establishes (Nielsen #7 flexibility and efficiency of use; Krug: conventions over invention). This binds number keys (1-9) to option selection and Enter/Space to advancing a dialogue or the timed fishing prompt, while leaving the text-entry field to handle its own keys. A live `currentScreen` reference drives the handler and is cleared on submit so a stray keypress can't double-submit. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every option rendered as the same neutral-blue button, so "Delete a Save File" and the "Yes, delete it" confirmation looked exactly like "Sell Fish" or "Load Slot 1". Deleting a save is irreversible, and giving an irreversible action the same affordance as benign ones invites a mis-click (Nielsen #5 error prevention; Nielsen #4 consistency and standards / Krug conventions — destructive actions conventionally read as red). Options whose label mentions "delete" now render with a red danger style, so the deletion path and its confirmation stand out from ordinary choices on the way to an unrecoverable action. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
If the game process stopped (a crash, or the window/terminal closed) the client kept polling /state in a swallowed try/catch and just sat on the last screen forever. To the player the game looked frozen with no hint that anything was wrong or that they should restart it (Nielsen #1 visibility of system status; Nielsen #9 help users recognize and recover from errors). After a few consecutive failed polls the client now shows a "Lost connection — is it still running?" banner and keeps retrying, clearing it automatically if the server comes back. The intentional "game ended" screen is left untouched so a clean quit doesn't get an alarming banner. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Summary
A Nielsen/Krug usability pass on the web front-end (
src/ui/webUserInterface.py— the served HTML/JS client). Every commit is one self-contained, heuristic-cited fix, scoped small for easy review.Round 1 — feedback, control & convention on the web client
Test plan
1–9in a menu (e.g. the docks) selects that option without clicking;Enter/Spacedismisses a dialogue and triggers the fishing "React!".python3 -m pytest— 198 passed; client JS passesnode --check.🤖 Generated with Claude Code