Re: Keyboard usage on some Gnome windows not working

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

Matthew Thomas wrote:
> On 19 Oct, 2005, at 2:49 PM, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > Matthew said:
> > > In Windows 2000 and (I think) Windows XP, all access key underlines  
> > > are hidden by default.  
> > > <http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/windowsxp/  
> > > hideunderlines.aspx> This makes the interface less ugly, and 
> > > possibly  also somewhat faster for people who aren't disabled (as it  
> > > discourages them from thinking that finding and typing the access 
> > > key  is faster than using Tab or the mouse).
> >
> > I am hoping there are missing <sarcasm> tags around that last comment  
> > :-)
> > ...
>
> No, there aren't. <http://asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html>

He doesn't talk there about the specifics of the studies they did, but I 
read another article where he did. It was something like "Here is a 
paragraph of text. Change every instance of the letter X to Y." Some 
users were tested using arrow keys, some using the mouse. The mouse 
users won. This is not surprising; by the third substitution you'd 
expect that all of the mouse users would have settled into having one 
hand glued to the "Y" key and the other glued to the mouse, whereas the 
keyboard-only users would have to keep switching between different keys. 
 But "move around and type the same key repeatedly" is not 
representative of normal user tasks.

And besides, even if he was right about the timing, I think he's wrong 
about the psychology. He's arguing for making minor gains in actual 
productivity at the expense of major losses in *perceived* productivity. 
 That's going to lead to a bad user experience overall.

-- Dan