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Subject:Re. Mouse as fast as keyboard? From:Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> Date:Thu, 2 Nov 1995 14:32:29 LCL
To address this question David Mitchell cites (Bruce?)
Tognazzini's studies, which demonstrated that selecting
menu commands by mouse is no slower than using keyboard
equivalents. He also notes that Tognazzini observed that
the difference in perceived speed was entirely subjective.
Nice job of research, David... hard empirical evidence of
this sort is rare enough to be worth mentioning.
However, the latter part of the findings is what seems most
important to me: If the users feel that something is slow
or awkward, it is... no matter what the numbers say. User
perceptions are generally more important to the success of
a product than hard, numeric measures, and this suggests
the solution to Melissa's original problem: do a usability
test, even a simple one and see what the users think.
--Geoff Hart @8^{)}
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of our
reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.