Re: [9fans] Mousing is faster than typing but users do not believe it

[Paul Lalonde <paul.a.lalonde@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1940 bytes --]

It sounds easy.  But few folks on this list are HCI researchers (I'll tell
you it's odd going from GPU design to HCI - but it's fun!).

None of the micro-tasks (mouse vs keyboard) that folks are going on about on
this list is meaningful to measure.  We know keyboards are good for some
things, and mice are good for others.  Leaving off my personal religion and
anecdotes (I use acme as my editor of choice), the only meaningful measure
is how well the whole system functions for your tasks.  And to really
measure that you need similar measures of expertise.  So we can compare vi
to notepad, for example, and find that "keyboard is better than mouse" by
some measure, but grab an expert acme user vs vi, and perhaps acme comes out
ahead on some task completions and behind on others.

There are, however, good models of what various interactions cost - the
bibilography on doi
10.1145/1978942.1979088<http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979088>
(Bonnie
John, "Using Predictive Human Performance Modls of Inspire and Support UI
Desgin Recommendations") is a recent starting point on predictive modelling
for interface design (that I have in front of me - I know there's better
sources).  I'd recommend becoming familiar with this literature, and then
trying to make the "mouse vs keyboard" argument witha straight face.

Paul

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 6:55 AM, Iruatã Souza <iru.muzgo@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 4:57 AM, Guilherme Lino <guih.lino@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > better with it... but generally keyboard is much faster on most day
> tasks,
> > people just don't have the patience to learn it
> >
>
> Measuring the keyboard versus mouse speed is such a trivial experiment
> to repeat.
> Still, as Noah pointed out, people rely on intuition.
>
>


-- 
I'm migrating my email.  plalonde@telus.net will soon be disconnected.
 Please use paul.a.lalonde@gmail.com from now on.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3193 bytes --]