Re: Keyboard usage on some Gnome windows not working

[Matthew Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On 21 Oct, 2005, at 2:12 PM, Shaun McCance wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-10-21 at 13:14 -0200, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 09:47 -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2005-10-20 at 08:49 -0200, Matthew Thomas wrote:
> ...
> > > > No, there aren't. <http://asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html>
> ...
> > > The keyboard is clearly faster at many tasks.  For instance,
> > > I type anywhere from 130 to 150 wpm, depending on the day.
> > > If you tell me I could mouse that faster with GOK, I will
> > > laugh at you and ignore every post you make from now on.
> >
> > This thread is about keyboard equivalents to menu/toolbar/title bar
> > commands. If you construct straw men like "the mouse is faster than
> > typing" when no-one suggested that, I will laugh at you but keep 
> > reading your posts. I like laughing.
>
> From Tog's article:
> * Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than
> mousing.
> * The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
>
> There's no qualifiers here.  In the absence of any qualifying
> statements, I'm forced to assume he means "for all tasks" or at least 
> "for most tasks".

Not really. If you read the rest of the page (even the first two 
paragraphs will do), you can see that the subject under discussion is 
keyboard combos for commands like Print, Redo, and Delete.

> ...
> This article, like most stuff I've read from Tog, is sloppy.  It takes
> some statistical data that's probably relevant to a lot of things we
> might discuss here, and wraps it in universal dogma.  This, in turn,
> creates legions of OSNews posters who think they understand the very
> essence of existence because they read an "Ask Tog" article.

True. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to have been much relevant 
research on the public Web until the past couple of years, so Tog had 
the topic to himself.

> ...
> > Agreed, more detailed research would be nice. Lane et al. 2005 found
> > keyboard equivalents to be faster for Copy, Open, Paste, and Save, 
> > but their experiment seems rather unrealistic -- people were given 
> > several practice runs first, allowing them to keep the keyboard 
> > equivalent in their short-term memory, when in real life it wouldn't 
> > be. (It's the retrieval from long-term memory which is the big 
> > time-sucker, according to Tognazzini.)
>
> Well, I think it's fair that you test shortcuts when they are
> ingrained in muscle memory, because that's when they're really
> useful.

Part of the speed of a keyboard equivalent is whether it is in 
someone's muscle memory in the first place, or whether they have to dig 
it out of long-term memory. Putting it in short-term memory instead is 
dodging the question.

To get back to access keys, probably the only access key that's in the 
muscle memory of a non-trivial number of people is Alt+D in Internet 
Explorer for Windows.

> ...
> Other than not having home-row-accessible cursor movement
> key commands, our interfaces right now work pretty well for
> both the keyboard and the mouse, as well as many other input
> devices.  Why change what's not broken?
> ...

Because like typewriters in the 1880s, cars in the 1910s, and music 
players in the 1970s, personal computers today are still horribly 
awkward things to use.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/