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

[William Cowan <wmcowan@uwaterloo.ca>]

Iruat?? 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.

Not nearly as trivial as it looks. It is easy to find tasks on which the
keyboard outperforms the mouse 10 to 1, and it's easy to find the
opposite.

Sample tasks at random you say. What is the correct universe to sample
if we wish to substantiate the sort of categorical assertions made on
this thread?

Once you solve these problems you can start thinking about which mouse
and keyboard to use, how many different implementations you need to be
sure that you're not getting an implementation-dependent result and so
on.

Then you get down to the hard problems, like interactions between the
universe of possible subjects and all the factors above. Doing a good
experiment is difficult and time-consuming.