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.
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.
> the author typed a paragraph and then had to replace every “e” with a “|”, either using cursor keys or the mouse. The author found that the average time for using cursor keys was 99.43 seconds and the average time for the mouse was 50.22 seconds
Sure, keyboard-only users who do that exact task who literally use the arrow keys plus backspace are slower than mouse users, but since keyboard-only users don't do bulk search and replace by navigating to each relevant character with arrow keys, that's a meaningless benchmark.
:%s/e/|/g
Sure, there are text replace tools within most programs, but that doesn't mean that even half of the people using computers will know how to use them, or will ever bother to learn, when there are alternatives available. To that end, it makes sense to optimize for either of the easiest approaches, be it either using basic keyboard commands or the mouse.
That's also why GUIs are more popular for personal computing, as opposed to CLIs, or TUIs. Of course, CLIs could also be improved ( think tar vs docker UX, which can be achieved with something like https://typer.tiangolo.com/ ) and TUIs are also somewhat underused (nmtui, ncdu and many others are great pieces of software).
As for the actual amount of money spent - that is indeed a "yikes", how does someone even spend so much?
Perhaps the key takeaway is that Apple optimizes interfaces for people who don't know how to use a computer.
OECD Skills Studies > Skills Matter
http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
> 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.
That's not my experience at all. Once you learn a keyboard shortcut, it doesn't take two seconds to recall it. Were his tests on expert users, or on beginners?
Sure ctrl z everyones got down. But what about alt k to kill that one process in that one program you have to keep fixing for that one client?
Not really.
It ends up in a weird situation where if someone asks what the keyboard binding for, say, inserting a row into a org-mode table, I wouldn't be able to answer. Something with maybe a c in it, and a '-', not sure? Yet, once in the situation that needs it, the fingers move by themselves.
Also related, musicians don't spend two seconds figuring out how to play a note.
The issue is not speed, it's control. Precision, if you will. I can automate repeated tasks with the keyboard. Doing that with the mouse is beyond awkward; it's counterintuitive.
Mouse is for interaction. Keyboard is for automation.
(Obviously for some tasks, e.g., ones involving graphics, we need a mouse.)
Is automation faster than interaction. You tell me. Try doing everything your computer does by hand. I will give you $50 million for your efforts. Then report back with your discoveries.
Generally no one (seriously) programs a computer exclusively with a mouse. A keyboard is used. Surely, there must be a reason for this.
Of course, the "tech" company model of the world needs users to not be programmers. The mouse is taken as a signal "we have a human on the line". Automation is taken as a signal "it's a bot". Truly, the only significant difference between the two is that it is far more difficult to manipulate, analyse and serve ads to "bots" and charge advertisers money for it. Users who can program the computer to automate tasks can escape online advertising and tracking in ways that others cannot.
I certainly use a keyboard to program, but I also make good use of my mouse (well, touchpad) for text selection, changing windows, etc.
Yeah, looks like there is a reason for this. Keys are only present in keyboards and not mouse..
I love to think keyboard is king, but none of this matters—it's whatever floats your boat.
However I wonder if the person(s) who authored the code he copied and pasted also used only mouse, let alone one with 14 buttons.
"... it's whatever floats your boat."
True. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorForth
If someone designs a system for input where I can only use a mouse, for me thats a boat sinker. Not that I love keyboards, it's just they are better than anything else I have found.
...except that it was a one-to-one mapping of function to button kinda deal. He didn't have time for fancy things like key-combos!
Yeah, who knows what programming will look like in the future. I'm a huge stay-on-the-keyboard snob but also, I have `set mouse=a` in my vimrc because often I want to hold a drink in one hand scroll through code with another. Shoot-me-why-don't-ya!?? And heck, sometimes it's just that my right hand was already on my mouse to use a macOS feature and now now my left hand cmd-tabbed me back to vim. It's all about laziness, right? My right hand does quickly find itself back on the home row in the latter situation, of course.
colorForth intrigues me.
How much of one's internal working memory has to be flushed of the image of what you're trying to create, so that you can visually process mousing through menus much more densely packed than anything back in 1989 when Tog wrote that reply?
I always opt for a compact numpad-less keyboard with a trackpad right next to it. I like to have the trackpad as close to the keyboard as possible.
I'm a vim user, and what this means is that while I mostly use the keyboard, I can quickly switch over to the trackpad as an auxiliary input for certain movements.
I know the common refrain with vim is to learn how to do things without the mouse... and I certainly can do that pretty effectively. But after over 10 years of vim, I find that using a little bit of trackpad can actually save a lot of time.
Even if it's subconscious and technically faster, or even an illusion - I feel like mouse is consuming more cognitive resources.
The feedback loop with keyboard can feel quite different, in flow it feels like you issue commands and look for immediate response.
Also, when doing a repetitive task you quickly pick up key rhythms and patterns without needing prodigous memory to recall every possible "shortcut".
What I am not sure the user interface testing covered is making users perform the same task 50 times per day.
I don't think that using keyboard to control mouse has the same advantages as a keyboard-native interface.
That advantage and disadvantage tradeoff heavily depends on the nature of core functionality, how it’s mapped to the UI by the developer/designer, and user’s overall experience and familiarity with software.
Tog insists that professional users discard the evidence of their own decades of experience using a computer in favor of the results of his stopwatch but not only declines to show his exact results and methods but declines to even conduct an experiment which looks even slightly like a professional computer using completing a task preferring a nonsensical exercise that appears designed to be automated for even greater savings. Why then after the writer discredits their ability to understand the topic 32 years ago are we still discussing their words.
It's hardly necessary to touch much on his ideas about hierarchies of complexity or perceptible time as he only needs to venture outside his own area of expertise into new and exciting theories about neurology and perception to support the otherwise forlorn and unproven theory that using the mouse was inherently faster in the first place.
If you ever in the course of your programming find the need to formulate new theories of quantum physics to explain why everyone else is wrong and you are correct you may want to step back and consider whether you have departed from the beaten path or perhaps from reality.
So why are we still wasting bandwidth on him?
Incidentally this reply was composed in Emacs. I sadly have a bad habit of misspelling words that spell check has alas done little to alleviate. Each time I misspelled a word instead of taking my hands off of the keyboard I hit a hotkey to go back to the first misspelled word tracking backwards from cursor. Most of the time the first suggestion was correct and I merely hit Enter. Once I had mangled it so badly that I had to hit a few characters to set it once again upon the right track. So 95% of the time 2 keystrokes, rarely 4 to correct misspellings after which I could continue typing from wherever I left off.
Sometimes I found that I didn't like a particular paragraph and wished to rewrite it. This can be accomplished in Emacs evil mode with cip meaning change in paragraph. This erases the current paragraph cursor is in regardless of where in the paragraph you are in other times I just wanted to rewrite part of a sentence in normal mode capital C deletes onward from point and leaves you in insert to continue typing.