Apple R&D (1989): Mousing is faster than keyboarding, but users don't believe it

This is because operating a mouse-based user interface is a conscious process - one which cannot be fully relegated to "muscle memory." Unlike the keyboard, the mouse scarcely rewards learning at all.

Erik Naggum, in a Usenet post (circa 1997) explains this far better than I could:

"The clumsiness of people who have to engage their brain at every step is unbearably painful to watch, at least to me, and that's what the novice-friendly software makes people do, because there's no elegance in them, it's just a mass of features to be learned by rote... it's sadly obvious that we are moving into a way of working that is predominantly _conscious_, for which I believe the human brain was never prepared. we no longer have the time to let skills sink into the autonomous nervous system, as it were, and even if we try, the criminal in Redmond, WA, has a new, incompatible version out by the time we learned the last version... One of the joys of learning to ride a bicycle is to stop thinking about it -- the feeling that I had successfully programmed my body to master a bicycle at least thrilled me as a kid (except I didn't know the verb "to program")... we need to communicate to users that learning to use Emacs is like learning to ride a bicycle -- it does take some time and effort, it's a worth-while skill to have, and then you never forget. I firmly believe that the novice-friendly software is like giving people several sets of supporting wheels so they won't tilt, but could get moving right away, and then never taking them off, preferring that they keep using them and moving so slowly that they always need them. of course, if you argue that they should remove the supporting wheels to such users, they will, admittedly correctly, argue that they will fall _splat_ on the ground and ruin their three-piece suits. clearly a no-go."

(http://groups.google.com/group/comp.emacs/msg/821a0f04bab918...)

This classic article is from 1989. You wouldn't believe what a state-of-the-art interface looked like in 1989. My awesome shiny new Mac SE/30 -- an excellent machine -- had a 512 by 342 black and white display (and I do mean black and white, not greyscale) and a 16MHz processor, which was considered fairly powerful.

My point is: We lived in a totally different universe back then. So, admire the methodology, but don't waste time debating the relevance of the results. Do some new measurements on your interface with your tasks. This is especially important now that touch interfaces have finally escaped from the lab: We are only starting to develop experience with such things, and everything is up for debate again.

I used to play RO, and in /bm mode, I had access to 24 hotkeys (qaz rows). Enough? Hell naw. Even after they gave us access to another 8 keys (total 32), I still had macros set up for playing. On 31ms average ping to the server, I could dodge .3s casts - absolutely impossible by clicking.

While the mouse is more intuitive in the beginning, for anyone who actually uses their computer a lot, the keyboard becomes increasingly faster. Having to find the developer tab on excel and then hit export, save, and yes is much slower than Alt->L->E->Enter->Left->Enter for example. The idea of hotkeys, is just like ctrl+z, ctrl+c, and ctrl+v, they become intuitive.

A funny anecdote: I used to use ctrl+z (undo) hundreds of time a day when I was designing Worms Armageddon maps in paint. There came a time, where when I made a mistake in class on paper, my left hand would automatically go into the ctrl+z position, and move down even when there was no keyboard.

People need to remember:

1.) This was the result of an actual user interface study. Responding with anecdotal evidence makes you seem less than intelligent.

2.) This only applies to the specific type of software studied (perhaps even within the time frame) and should not be taken out of context. Bringing up Emacs or Vi is completely out of scope with the discussion and if I had the power to; I'd down vote each comment that does.

Tog's article makes it sound like mousing is always faster, but that's clearly and incontrovertibly wrong. I know nuance doesn't make for an eye-catching headline, but it would be nice to see somewhere in the essay.

" 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. "

Nolan Larsen from WordPerfect Corp. puts it nicely:

" ... When scrolling the text horizontally in a window we would refresh the text by redisplaying each line starting at the top. This resulted in a wave of text rippling down the screen, and many complaints that the screen refresh was too slow. The remedy was to scroll the bits already on screen and then redisplay each line from the top. The second implementation was actually slower than the first because we incurred the overhead of scrolling the bits before we even started to display the new text on the screen. However, the perception was that there was an immense increase in speed. We stuck with the second implementation because it increased the overall satisfaction of the user even though it actually decreased the throughput of the product.

In my mind, perception is stronger than reality. A user’s perception of a product is what causes him to purchase it and influences his satisfaction with the product... "

> 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.

It's there, plain and simple: keyboarding around switches off (or busy-waits) a part of our brain, while providing nice tactile and quantized visual (every character stop) stimuli in regular interval. It feels faster, because that's how our brain is wired to measure time.

On the other hand, mousing around doesn't provide any cool stimuli until you actually activate the target widget. It feels long-ish, because the brain has to constantly work on adjusting cursor trajectory and nothing serious happens till you actually activate the widget.

The later argument is the case of rarely used commands. Of course ^S or ^P is faster than hunting the `Save...' or `Print...' through modern long menus, but that's an exception; an action to be taken once every few minutes. Manipulating text tokens and blocks (that's what we do most often, right?) is inherently faster with mouse than with Vim-ish or EMACS-ish regexps. Same for browsing hyper-text documentation or 'net forums.

Tell me you can select and move around a word, line or block of code faster with regexps than with mouse, and I'll gladly do it faster with mouse. On the average, anyway, which is what matters in the longer run.

Link: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/revisiting-keyboard...

Now take an app that is keyboard-centric like Notational Velocity (or gvim/macvim). All of a sudden keyboarding is more efficient.

Now, compare the speed and efficiency between the two paradigms. No surprise who wins there.

Use the paradigm that fits the application. Use the applications that fit your style. Nothing new here.

I am not trying to say that multitouch+jitouch+hotcorners is the best solution for all interactions. Surely for activities like coding it's probably not. But over the past few weeks I've grown to prefer it for web browsing and general navigating the OS.

http://www.jitouch.com/index.php?page=jitouch

I'd like to see the exact methodology. 2 seconds to decide which key press to use sounds fishy to me.

When using an app like Pages or Word, the mouse will be faster because keyboard navigation in those apps is terrible. You may be able to save some mousing with command-p, but for general editing tasks like highlighting and moving text, the mouse will always beat the keyboard.

In vim, however, editing via keyboard is well designed and always faster than mousing.

The true test would be to compare editing LaTex with vim versus a rich text document with TextEdit.

I'm really curious ( and not trolling ) : Don't you guys need to think "before" and "while" coding ? Or you just type as faster as you can ? I need to design and "try" code on my mind and then write it, i can make some last moment corrections while writing. Most of time, my code works as i designed and i'm spending much of my time with designing not writing. So what's the matter ?

I made a switch from PC to Apple 4 years ago. The lack of meaningful keyboard shortcuts drives me mad. Consider a simple task of switching applications with the Cmd-Tab key: Minimize the only window of your application. Switch to another program, then cmd-tab back to your original program. Where did the window go? Oh, it's still sitting in the dock. So, grab the mouse, go get your window - and if you have 3 monitors (like I do), your mouse can be in a different zip code and it takes a long time just to find the cursor.

In fact, I think if we did this study today, we would find that due to bigger screen sizes, it's harder to spot the cursor, which would probably increase "mousing" time. However, Apple has 6 modifier keys on a laptop: Shift, Fn, Control, alt, option, and cmd, so trying to remember these keys can be a challenge too (and drives me crazy as well). What is the full screenshot shortcut? Control-Cmd-Shift-3 (aka finger-gymnastics)

However, I almost never want to highlight an arbitrary region, but instead a sentence, a paragraph, a line, the text in some quotes, the text until the next semi-colon, or something similar. And vi gives me easily expressed intrinsics to do all of those very quickly.

On the other hand, I can use a mouse just fine with a soda or cup of tea in my other hand, something I can't do with a keyboard. :)

In any interface, there is a learning curve. Some users never progress beyond the most basic stages, and each time they interact with the software it's as if they are starting over. Other users develop further along the learning curve to the point that using a hotkey becomes cheaper. Many users bring overlap from other interfaces (which is what makes an interface intuitive — it fits the user's expectations). As more hotkeys are defined they will be for less and less common actions, which fewer users will learn, remember, and use. People will also move up and down the curve depending on their frequency of use with the software.

A useful product should have both. The more complex a product gets, the more the user skill stratifies (from newbs to pros), the more necessary both a GUI and hotkey interface is. The GUI provides a scheme for organizing the myriad features and functions as a fallback interaction layer, while hotkeys allow the user to leap ahead.

HN users are overwhelmingly savvy, which is shown by the support of keyboard interactions.

Oh, and IIRC, the original research was on a dual-monitor setup, moving the pointer over two screens. And yet, Tog measured that the mouse was faster. I do assume he had a Macintosh mouse on a Mac, though. Compared to PC mice of the era, those were good (especially software-wise. There were PC mice were it was (as good as?) impossible to move the mouse by a single pixel.)

But there's something weird that happens to me whenever I adventure myself into a longer or smarter key combination that does a lot for little (ie. a macro). My mind will actually figure out the correct sequence quickly (< 1s) and fire it up... but then, after accomplishing my goal, I freeze during ~5s with a strange, contemplative doze in my face. That's when all the productivity it gave me goes down the drain.

So maybe too much keyboard shortcutting ends up overloading the brain at some point or another, in an effort to learn, rinse, repeat or out of sheer ecstasy.

Part 3: http://www.asktog.com/SunWorldColumns/S02KeyboardVMouse3.htm...

I won't even try to compare vim/emacs to Word.

Nice bit of trivia there. I remember the Apple Extended Keyboard being big, but not that big. IBM Model Ms are pretty much the biggest keyboard I can think of.

- One of my Professors

I wonder if mussel memory ever catches up to make the time benefit break the other way. I want something closed, hitting f3 is the same as typing any other letter. I had to look down to see what F-button it actually is.

but i use xmonad and/or dwm. i can tell you that keyboards are faster in interfaces designed for keyboards