23 May
2001
23 May
'01
5:06 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great John Foust once stated:
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.
Hold on a second ... according to Tog, which is faster? He seems to be
arguing out both sides of his mouth here. First he says the mouse is
faster, then the keyboard. It can't be both. And was Apple testing people
who *could* type, or *couldn't*?
And if this was in the 80s, then that was with Apple keyboards that didn't
have a numeric keypad/editing pad, or (on the later keyboards) the separate
editing keys *and* the numeric keypad.
-spc (But there's a reason why Raskin's ``Find'' function was 50 times
faster ... )