Is Mousing Faster?
There's been some discussion on the Mac blogosphere this week regarding the relative speed of using the mouse v the keyboard. I obviously have a horse in this race, and that horse is called MercuryMover (a program that lets you move and resize your windows via the keyboard.) Scott Stevenson wrote about how some of the changes in Leopard may seem to negatively impact usability, but in actuality might be a net gain for users due to difficult-to-quantify reasons (this is a poor thumbnail sketch, you should definitely read the original). He cites none other than Bruce Tognazzini: User Interface Superhero. According to this article :
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.
Scott's take home point is that the obvious solution (provide better keyboard navigation since it feels faster) may not actually provide a better experience.
My angle on this is clear: I think that keyboarding is cool. The original article was written 18 years ago, at a time when the average monitor had only a few hundred thousand pixels of real estate. By contrast, my new iMac has well over 2 million. I have a lot more ground to cover with my mouse than Tog did back in the day. My snazzy new keyboard may very well be faster under these circumstances (although my one-man-shop isn't going to spring for the usability study to find out.) Secondly, and this is really Scott's point, i love to use my keyboard. It feels much faster to me and that's why i (no joke) love to use MercuryMover. I wrote this program because i knew it would make me feel just slightly more powerful when i used my Mac; and indeed it does every day.