12 Apr
2007
12 Apr
'07
6:18 p.m.
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.
I suspect that this is true only when the keyboard gesture is
relatively unfamiliar. Use the same gesture for the same function
frequently and for a few years and I believe this aspect will
completely disappear - I have certainly found this true for myself;
when I create a new gesture for my own use, it takes a lot of use, but
after it's had that "a lot of use", it becomes as reflexive, as
subconscious, as deeply wired into my fingers, so to speak, as, say,
the locations of the letters. In my favourite text editor, I no longer
think about the keystrokes for performing routine functions; my
consciousness decides to, say, delete-word backward, or save-file, and
my fingers find the appropriate buttons without any further conscious
action - just as I decide to type, say, "decide", and my fingers find
the appropriate buttons in the appropriate order without further
intervention from my conscious.
Unless the studies in question specifically included people who had had
years of experience with the gesture in question, in which case I would
very much like to see a reference, because I want to read up on it.
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.
In the 80s? Then I feel quite sure none of the subjects had the years
of experience I wrote of above. (Not that this is necessarily a
problem with the study for the purposes for which it was done, which
was presumably for mass-market users, most of which will be new to the
system. Just that it invalidates the results when applied to people
who *have* had that experience - that it's really measuring the effect
of inexperience with inherently meaningless keyboard gestures versus
the inherent meaningfulness of mouse genstures.)
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.
*Two seconds*? Just to remember the keystroke?? *Definitely*
unpracticed users! Even when using Windows (which I occasionally do at
work), I can windows-R-return and get a command window up faster than
the time it's supposed to take me to merely remember how to do it.
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