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Regardless of the original claims on keyboard versus mouse (there is more recent work on that subject), there are some really nice gems in the article and comme

Regardless of the original claims on keyboard versus mouse (there is more recent work on that subject), there are some really nice gems in the article and comments, that are still relevant for current interfaces: " Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface. Guideline: The work to design and build the keyboard interface should not sap resources that are needed for the creation of the visual interface. " Nolan Larsen from WordPerfect Corp. puts it nicely: " ... When scrolling the text horizontally in a window we would refresh the text by redisplaying each line starting at the top. This resulted in a wave of text rippling down the screen, and many complaints that the screen refresh was too slow. The remedy was to scroll the bits already on screen and then redisplay each line from the top. The second implementation was actually slower than the first because we incurred the overhead of scrolling the bits before we even started to display the new text on the screen. However, the perception was that there was an immense increase in speed. We stuck with the second implementation because it increased the overall satisfaction of the user even though it actually decreased the throughput of the product. In my mind, perception is stronger than reality. A user’s perception of a product is what causes him to purchase it and influences his satisfaction with the product... "

wunderfool 15y ago
> "Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the > visual interface" that is only a "guideline" because it follows from their axiom that the UI must be driven by the mouse if you remove that axiom, this no longer makes sense
lurker19 15y ago
Translating to modern technology, Nolan would express surprise that his irrational users that preferred web pages that displayed text before downloading media, or displayed above-the-fold content before rendering the rest, or liked being able to see welcome message instead of a full-screen loading animation at game startup, because the less-user-friendly version has the optimal "reality" of taking less time to finish an return to idle. The lessons Nolan got tanalizingly close to discovering were that overall user experience matters more than whatever metric is easiest to measure mechanically, and that sometimes empirical data can disprove a theory. (Ironically, this second lesson was part of the message of Tog's article.).
joe_the_user 15y ago
The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface. I'm writing this on a borrowed Mac and hating the damn thing (damn mouse-base dreck seriously slows me down). I would say that because of its keyboard use, the Windows interface is far more effective than the Macintosh interface but that the Mac interface is designed to seem usable. I would suppose something that seems great is exactly what companies should sell for their own benefit. I'm happy that Mac is not yet universal...
- StavrosK 15y ago
  You're conflating speed with usability. I'm insanely fast on Windows, to the point where coworkers would make a sort of spectacle out of how fast I can open windows and explore the filesystem and such, but it's just because I know the shortcuts while they fumbled with a mouse. Windows' keyboard accessibility combined with its responsiveness blows all other OSes out of the water, Gnome is accessible but less responsive, OS X is not accessible but responsive. OS X is not keyboard-accessible at all, but it's more usable for novice users, as it doesn't confuse them with many options, the UI is cleaner, everything is laid out better, etc. I don't think anyone claims that using OS X is faster per se...
  - mitchty 15y ago
    OSX is not keyboard accessible by default, its is not however "not keyboard-accessible". Go into system preferences and turn on keyboard navigation and adjust the keymaps to your hearts content. Heck add scripts to execute on certain key combinations if you want. And if you like you can remap what its defaults are to whatever you like. OSX is setup to be transparent to novice users. That doesn't mean it cannot be setup to be used with a keyboard. Just that the default, which for 99% of users doesn't allow they keyboard to interfere with a novice user. I can get OSX to do quite literally everything from the keyboard, I'm not sure how one can argue it isn't keyboard accessible when it is trivial to turn on. And being the 1% of the population that cares about it, power users shouldn't be afraid of learning how to turn it on. Hopefully this didn't come across as harsh, but I just get annoyed at people that equate OSX = mouse only interface. When you can tell the whole idea behind the interface is to make default things simple to use with a single mouse button and make the rest possible. Despite what we think the actual idea of more than one mouse button is about as foreign as trying to understand Russian to an Englishman. Its more cognitive load than most care about.

wunderfool 15y ago

> "Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the > visual interface" that is only a "guideline" because it follows from their axiom that the UI must be driven by the mouse if you remove that axiom, this no longer makes sense

lurker19 15y ago

Translating to modern technology, Nolan would express surprise that his irrational users that preferred web pages that displayed text before downloading media, or displayed above-the-fold content before rendering the rest, or liked being able to see welcome message instead of a full-screen loading animation at game startup, because the less-user-friendly version has the optimal "reality" of taking less time to finish an return to idle. The lessons Nolan got tanalizingly close to discovering were that overall user experience matters more than whatever metric is easiest to measure mechanically, and that sometimes empirical data can disprove a theory. (Ironically, this second lesson was part of the message of Tog's article.).

joe_the_user 15y ago

The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface. I'm writing this on a borrowed Mac and hating the damn thing (damn mouse-base dreck seriously slows me down). I would say that because of its keyboard use, the Windows interface is far more effective than the Macintosh interface but that the Mac interface is designed to seem usable. I would suppose something that seems great is exactly what companies should sell for their own benefit. I'm happy that Mac is not yet universal...

StavrosK 15y ago
You're conflating speed with usability. I'm insanely fast on Windows, to the point where coworkers would make a sort of spectacle out of how fast I can open windows and explore the filesystem and such, but it's just because I know the shortcuts while they fumbled with a mouse. Windows' keyboard accessibility combined with its responsiveness blows all other OSes out of the water, Gnome is accessible but less responsive, OS X is not accessible but responsive. OS X is not keyboard-accessible at all, but it's more usable for novice users, as it doesn't confuse them with many options, the UI is cleaner, everything is laid out better, etc. I don't think anyone claims that using OS X is faster per se...
- mitchty 15y ago
  OSX is not keyboard accessible by default, its is not however "not keyboard-accessible". Go into system preferences and turn on keyboard navigation and adjust the keymaps to your hearts content. Heck add scripts to execute on certain key combinations if you want. And if you like you can remap what its defaults are to whatever you like. OSX is setup to be transparent to novice users. That doesn't mean it cannot be setup to be used with a keyboard. Just that the default, which for 99% of users doesn't allow they keyboard to interfere with a novice user. I can get OSX to do quite literally everything from the keyboard, I'm not sure how one can argue it isn't keyboard accessible when it is trivial to turn on. And being the 1% of the population that cares about it, power users shouldn't be afraid of learning how to turn it on. Hopefully this didn't come across as harsh, but I just get annoyed at people that equate OSX = mouse only interface. When you can tell the whole idea behind the interface is to make default things simple to use with a single mouse button and make the rest possible. Despite what we think the actual idea of more than one mouse button is about as foreign as trying to understand Russian to an Englishman. Its more cognitive load than most care about.