23 May
2001
23 May
'01
3:45 a.m.
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