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This seems obvious to me, but it's still useful to have such research performed because there's a lot of gadgetphiles out there who can't or won't think clearly

This seems obvious to me, but it's still useful to have such research performed because there's a lot of gadgetphiles out there who can't or won't think clearly about it. I can feel physical buttons without taking my eyes off the road. With a touch screen if I want to do the same, I'm forced to reference my fingers off the bezel of the screen, if my hand can even span it, hoping the button is the same place it was before and hoping the software running the display is even in the right mode so the button is there at all. It's a no brainer that physical buttons are easier to use.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
> is even in the right mode so the button is there at all. This is actually really important, and it's something that even physical button-based systems can get wrong. Modal interfaces require careful thought because they change things out from under the user, making them unpredictable. Obviously, not all modal interfaces are bad (nobody would suggest that forward and reverse shouldn't use the same accelerator pedal), but in cars, most of them are terrible. It's why those old radios with 15 buttons and 7 dials are a cinch to use, but the newer radios that hide everything behind menus are terrible. Even something as simple as bass/mid/treble/balance/fader/volume/tuner are an absolute pain to use when you have to click a button to switch between modes, and those features might as well not exist due to how hard they are to operate. I've tried tweaking them while driving in some newer cars and it's always a terrible experience, but my current 20-year-old car has 7 separate dials for those functions, and I twiddle them all the time without even thinking about it.
tzs 4y ago
> This seems obvious to me, but it's still useful to have such research performed because there's a lot of gadgetphiles out there who can't or won't think clearly about it. When it comes to UI things that seem obvious sometimes turn out wrong so it is a good idea to do the research. Two examples, both from research I read of long before everything was on the internet so have no chance of tracking down citations. First involved a system with a command line interface. It was found that adding delay to some of the faster commands to slow them down made users perceive the overall system as being faster!? Apparently we aren't all that good at actually telling how long things take without actually measuring them. We instead judge fastness and slowness by how things compare to each other. We seem to notice slowness a lot more than fastness. If most commands are about the same time but a few are noticeably faster then we think of most commands as slow and that bothers us. If all the commands take about the same time, we don't perceive any as fast or slow. It just all seems normal and doesn't bother us. The second involved menus vs. keyboard shortcuts. Pretty much everyone feels that using a keyboard shortcut is faster than using a mouse to select a command from a menu. But in the system and users they tested they found it was around the same speed. Everyone tested was sure they were much slower with the mouse. Apparently what was going on here was that to do a command you have to first remember what you have to do to actually invoke the command and then you have to do that. With the menu those two tasks are (1) remember where the menu is you need and where the command is within that menu, and then (2) the moves and clicks to actually get the mouse to that menu item and click it. With the keyboard shortcut those two tasks are (1) remember what key combination invokes the commands, and then (2) pressing those keys. The second part was faster for the keyboard shortcut, but the first part was faster for the menu (my speculation is that because the menus are at specific locations that you have to move the mouse to we remember them spatially but keyboard shortcuts have to be remembered like a list of words, and humans are really good at the spatial memory stuff). The subjects still perceived the keyboard as way faster because the first part, recalling what you need to physically do, is mostly subconscious. They only really consciously perceived the part where they are actually doing the mouse stuff or doing the key pressing and since that part was faster for the keyboard they perceived the keyboard as faster. Note that these results might not generalize beyond the system and users they tested. I remember doing my own test and I found for the commands I tested with I was definitely faster both by the clock and by perception on the keyboard, but I was testing with commands that I used a lot. (I used cut/copy/paste). I can believe the result might have been different with more rarely used commands especially in a system with a large number of commands.

frosted-flakes 4y ago

> is even in the right mode so the button is there at all. This is actually really important, and it's something that even physical button-based systems can get wrong. Modal interfaces require careful thought because they change things out from under the user, making them unpredictable. Obviously, not all modal interfaces are bad (nobody would suggest that forward and reverse shouldn't use the same accelerator pedal), but in cars, most of them are terrible. It's why those old radios with 15 buttons and 7 dials are a cinch to use, but the newer radios that hide everything behind menus are terrible. Even something as simple as bass/mid/treble/balance/fader/volume/tuner are an absolute pain to use when you have to click a button to switch between modes, and those features might as well not exist due to how hard they are to operate. I've tried tweaking them while driving in some newer cars and it's always a terrible experience, but my current 20-year-old car has 7 separate dials for those functions, and I twiddle them all the time without even thinking about it.

tzs 4y ago

> This seems obvious to me, but it's still useful to have such research performed because there's a lot of gadgetphiles out there who can't or won't think clearly about it. When it comes to UI things that seem obvious sometimes turn out wrong so it is a good idea to do the research. Two examples, both from research I read of long before everything was on the internet so have no chance of tracking down citations. First involved a system with a command line interface. It was found that adding delay to some of the faster commands to slow them down made users perceive the overall system as being faster!? Apparently we aren't all that good at actually telling how long things take without actually measuring them. We instead judge fastness and slowness by how things compare to each other. We seem to notice slowness a lot more than fastness. If most commands are about the same time but a few are noticeably faster then we think of most commands as slow and that bothers us. If all the commands take about the same time, we don't perceive any as fast or slow. It just all seems normal and doesn't bother us. The second involved menus vs. keyboard shortcuts. Pretty much everyone feels that using a keyboard shortcut is faster than using a mouse to select a command from a menu. But in the system and users they tested they found it was around the same speed. Everyone tested was sure they were much slower with the mouse. Apparently what was going on here was that to do a command you have to first remember what you have to do to actually invoke the command and then you have to do that. With the menu those two tasks are (1) remember where the menu is you need and where the command is within that menu, and then (2) the moves and clicks to actually get the mouse to that menu item and click it. With the keyboard shortcut those two tasks are (1) remember what key combination invokes the commands, and then (2) pressing those keys. The second part was faster for the keyboard shortcut, but the first part was faster for the menu (my speculation is that because the menus are at specific locations that you have to move the mouse to we remember them spatially but keyboard shortcuts have to be remembered like a list of words, and humans are really good at the spatial memory stuff). The subjects still perceived the keyboard as way faster because the first part, recalling what you need to physically do, is mostly subconscious. They only really consciously perceived the part where they are actually doing the mouse stuff or doing the key pressing and since that part was faster for the keyboard they perceived the keyboard as faster. Note that these results might not generalize beyond the system and users they tested. I remember doing my own test and I found for the commands I tested with I was definitely faster both by the clock and by perception on the keyboard, but I was testing with commands that I used a lot. (I used cut/copy/paste). I can believe the result might have been different with more rarely used commands especially in a system with a large number of commands.