Richard Robinson wrote:
>On Tue, 10 Jul 2001, John Chambers wrote:
>
>> Modern GUIs are very well designed, for people with three hands. The
>> real problem has been how slow customers have been to make necessary
>> hardware upgrades to meet the requirements of the software.
>
>Quite ;-)
>
You might be interested in the following quote from Apple:
--------
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 feel 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 wanting to start a GUI vs CLI war or anything - just thought you
might find it interesting.)
Phil Taylor
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