[mjw1007]

I wish people would stop citing that old AskTOG article.

The $50 million (in 1989) research figure sounds impressive, but they don't say how much of that was keyboard-vs-mouse research and the answer is quite likely "very little".

It seems that, like most UX research, they were testing how well novices manage rather than how well people do after weeks of experience (the latter is expensive to test!).

When you get to "It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function." it's clear that what they were looking at is a very very long way from how a typical Vim or Emacs user works.

I think the article _is_ interesting as evidence for the proposition "it's possible for people to believe that they're quicker with the keyboard when they're not". But it's nowhere near enough evidence to get as far as "we can dismiss people who believe they're quicker with the keyboard as mistaken".

[btschaegg]

This this this. Citing articles like this and completely ignoring the setup of the experiments is one of the major pet peves I have with discussions like this one.

You could certainly reproduce those results - if the only program you test them with is MS Wordpad. If you're doin surveys involving editors that have a thought-through keyboard interface and with people who are actually trained in it, the result would never even be in the same ballpark. What we're looking for is the skill ceiling, not the skill floor.

[mtdewcmu]

I don't understand what task the users were doing when the mouse was discovered to be faster. The keyboard and mouse are not generally interchangeable; the task will generally favor one or the other. I'm assuming that the users were doing something like manipulating a GUI that favored the mouse and was awkward with the keyboard. The purpose of the study was probably to convince people to buy Apple's new mouse-centric computers.

Here is what's annoying: having to frequently move back and forth between the keyboard and mouse. Having to glance down to find the mouse to do one thing and then back to keyboard starts to break one's train of thought.

[mjw1007]

As far as I remember, in the one study that got reported users were asked to select a number of words scattered through a document and make them bold.

[mtdewcmu]

Oh, I get it. There was probably no efficient way to move the cursor around with the keyboard. That might explain why users said the keyboard was faster. It was faster for them to push the right buttons. They might have found the mouse cumbersome. They probably thought of the mouse wasting their time.

Do people still consider the results of this study valid? A mouse in 1989 was nothing like a mouse now.

[to3m]

This is the sort of thing the mouse is actually rather good for. Though you're probably better using Ctrl+B to embolden than you are the toolbar or menu.

[mtdewcmu]

It sounds like roughly the best case for the mouse and roughly the worst case for the keyboard.