On 10/20/05, Shaun McCance <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 08:49 -0200, Matthew Thomas wrote: > > No, there aren't. <http://asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html> > > > > I see there is some research showing that the keyboard is faster for > > common commands > > <http://ad-astra.ro/research/view_publication.php? > > publication_id=1508&lang=en>, but that wouldn't include access keys > > unless you were encountering particular dialogs or alerts very often.
> When Tog says "The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is > faster than keyboarding." I'm curious what he means. I'd > really like to see what tests were performed and what the > actual results were, rather than a one-line synopsis. As > a mathematician, I'm suspicious of pretty much any one-line > statistical synopsis. Imagine this test: Agreed, I thought the AskTog article was being overused and mis-applied in a number of cases, so I at one point went and read through the relevant article pretty closely, plus related ones and comments. Unfortunately, it's been a long time, but from what I recall, the tests were done in the 80's or so and users were not yet familiar with shortcut keys (i.e. no muscle memory to "bias" the results). In the explanations he provided for the mouse being faster than the keyboard, he said the reasoning was something along the lines of users need to do all kinds of shape recognition to recognize what the hotkeys are (including finding which letter is underlined, I presume) and then translate that into a letter, and then get their fingers to strike the right key. He did specifically say, perhaps in another article, that having certain shortcuts would save time over the mouse for very common operations (cut, copy, paste...; also, on a related note that I found amusing, he argued that command-p should be reserved for making text be plain (as opposed to bold or italic) instead of using the key for printing on the grounds that computers were almost exclusively used as word processors and making text plain was a far more common task...). Now, the big question is--how many have memorized the shortcut keys for certain dialogs that appear? Unless they show up often, users probably haven't memorized them and thus using them for those dialogs may actually be slower. Also, another interesting tidbit: A number of years back, I went for about 2 years without using emacs (or computers much at all, though that's beside the point...). It was kind of painful when I started using emacs again, because I couldn't recall what any of the necessary shortcuts were and didn't have a nearby listing of them. If someone asked me how to save my document, I would not have been able to tell them what the key sequence was. But, I started typing along anyway and at some point, nearly out of habit (I guess I don't trust autosave and have developed this habit of hitting the save sequence early and often), I found myself pushing my fingers down in a certain pattern that I hadn't forgotten--I quickly pressed the lower left key on the keyboard with my pinky and held it down and pressed two keys in succession with my index finger of the same hand. The sequence I happened to type was Ctrl-X, Ctrl-S. I then went "whoa, so that's how you save, cool." I had remembered where the keys were when I was in a rhythm, but not what they were. For the vast majority of the emacs shortcuts, I had to go look them up and learn them again, but for this one and a few others, I relearned them merely by using them in this only-know-how-to-move-my-fingers when not really thinking about it. Cheers, Elijah _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
