David Nečas (Yeti) wrote:
On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 07:32:47AM -0400, Elliotte Harold wrote:
1. It is faster to see and choose than remember and type.
You are confusing faster with easier for the novice or
casual user. Only the latter is important for gaining or
losing market share. (And since we are just casual users of
most things we use, the result is predictable. Hi, Dodo.)
No. I'm not. It's a common misconception that easier for the novice and
casual user also means harder for the expert. In fact that's rarely if
ever true. Easier for the novice and casual user is almost always
easier for the expert too.
In the specific case of "remember and type" vs. "see and choose" the
actual experimental results aren't even close. See and choose is
dramatically faster for everyone.
2. Fitt's Law,
The additive constant in Fitt's Law is orders of magnitude
different for the case you already hold the mouse and for the
case you have both hands on the keyboard -- which occurs
quite often in text edditing applications. You can't just
ignore this.
The experimental results are what they are, I'm afraid. (Most
unfortunately the experimental results also prove that there's severe
cognitive dissonance here: users always report they are faster using the
keyboard and are always measured to be faster using the mouse. Why this
dissonance exists seems to relate to short term vs. long term memory.)
There are a few cases one can contrive such as pasting the same line of
text 20 times where the keyboard may indeed be faster. However these are
relatively rare. Integrated over the tasks we actually perform most of
the time, mousing to the menus is faster, even if your brain is
screaming at you that the opposite is true. The brain lies. The
stopwatch doesn't.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
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