| https://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html: “We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts: - Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing. - The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding. This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster. People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement. It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist. While the keyboard users in this case feels as though they have gained two seconds over the mouse users, the opposite is really the case. Because while the keyboard users have been engaged in a process so fascinating that they have experienced amnesia, the mouse users have been so disengaged that they have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish. They have not had to set their task aside to think about or remember abstract symbols. Hence, users achieve a significant productivity increase with the mouse in spite of their subjective experience. Not that any of the above True Facts will stop the religious wars. And, in fact, I find myself on the opposite side in at least one instance, namely editing. By using Command X, C, and V, the user can select with one hand and act with the other. Two-handed input. Two-handed input can result in solid productivity gains (Buxton 1986). Command-Key Illusion. Since users do experience the illusion that keyboarding is faster, there is market pressure to supply them with "shortcuts."—even when using "shortcuts" will actually slow them down. What I generally recommend is supplying as many "shortcuts" as demanded by the market—the real market, not the programmer in the cubicle next to you. But only if these "shortcuts" are not to the detriment of the user of the Macintosh visual interface. This leads to two important guidelines: Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface. Guideline: The work to design and build the keyboard interface should not sap resources that are needed for the creation of the visual interface. In other words, don’t rape the primary interface for the benefit of so-called "power-users," who may well end up achieving lower productivity by using the keyboard interface anyway. This is a major problem right now.” I don’t think it’s as clear-cut as Tog says (for example, I agree with Tog about cut/copy/paste and, historically, command-S for Save (which, with Mac software from the 1980s, you hit very frequently, if you wedding want to lose stuff due to crashes). I also wonder whether do people with decades of vim editor usage really have to attend to basic cursor movement?), but it’s not completely untrue, either. |