At 10:21 PM 3/7/2005, Doc Shipley wrote:
Read 350 posts to a mailing list, in a
well-configured mail client of your choice.
Read 350 posts to any web forum.
Go Google "therbligs".
You're on track... the most time-wasting thing is the distraction
of starting to look at other interesting sites, not the keystrokes
and mouse movements you carried out to do it.
Better yet, Google therbligs first, and consider the
concept while you try to navigate the New! Improved! Web Forum.
It's not the New! part that sucks, it's the "This Sucks" part that
sucks.
Therbligs. Interesting and relevant. Hadn't heard of them
before. Would love to see some charted, in color. Color itself
as a clue to whether two motions were dissonant! Wonderful!
See my 2001 post below. However, in terms of time and motion, it
might be easier to scroll down (using your choice of interface)
rather than telling you to 'grep' your personal archive (and hoping
you hadn't pre-filtered and trashed the message) and assuming that
I can't simply include a hyperlink to it because this would
offend those on slower, non-WWW-capable computers.
- John
Date: Wed, 23 May 2001 10:45:39 -0500
To: classiccmp at
classiccmp.org
From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com>
Subject: Re: ID computer
At 11:10 PM 5/22/01 -0400, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
In his interview in ``Programmers at
Work,'' he stated he didn't care for
mice at all, as it forces you to relocate your hands from the keyboard to
the mouse, and that most navigation could be done faster via the keyboard
than with a mouse [3]. And his current work he mentions his dislike of the
mouse.
[3] In my experience, that's true once you learn how to navigate a
document via the keyboard. But there are some things I like using
a mouse for though.
It's interesting to note that another Apple-raised interface
theorist, Bruce Tognazzini,
http://www.asktog.com/ believes
(and claims to have tested and proved) that keyboard-based,
chording shortcut users engage in a momentary lapse of consciousness
in which they recall and then position their hands for the
keystroke, and that although they *think* they're faster
than a mouse, they're not.
See his 1991 book "Tog on Interface", where he claims in the 80s
Apple performed $50M in tests that showed that people consistently
reported believing that keyboarding (using shortcuts, etc.) was faster
than mousing, yet the stopwatch consistently showed that mousing was
faster than keyboarding.
His explanation for this is that deciding among abstract symbols is
a high-level cognitive function, and that this decision is not only
boring, but that the user experiences near-amnesia in the approximately
two seconds needed to remember the chord keystroke. On the other hand,
Tog also argues that two-handed chords (think the handy cut-and-paste
CTRL/C /V) result in solid productivity gains.
Around page 180, where in fact he discusses Raskin's Cat interface and
the decision to use a single dedicated key for operations such as "Find",
Tog admits was actually fifty times faster than the Mac's mouse-move.
This reminds me of the old joke about voice interface word processors:
"Up, up, up, left, left, left, left, no right, stop, yes, right
there ... delete that word." Or the other half of the joke, where
people poke their head over a cubicle wall and shout a command
like "format c: yes i am sure".
- John