Date: Wed, 3 Sep 1997 01:04:56 -0600 (MDT) From: Wes Peters <softweyr@xmission.com> To: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>, jamie@itribe.net (Jamie Bowden) Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Microsoft the GUI King (was Re: ATT Unix for Windows) Message-ID: <199709030704.BAA12723@obie.softweyr.ml.org> In-Reply-To: <199709011547.KAA00888@dyson.iquest.net> References: <199709011515.LAA25718@gatekeeper.itribe.net> <199709011547.KAA00888@dyson.iquest.net>
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Wes Peters wrote:
[ Lot's of GUI design, and Microsoft stuff deleted. ]
Jamie Bowden said:
% ONe thing to remember when designing the interface for any program,
% never make me have to use my mouse to use a feature. If I can't do
% it without leaving the keyboard, I probably won't. If it's
% important, and I can't do it without a mouse, you just lost a
% customer. I have spoken to many non CS types who hate being forced
% to use a mouse as well. If you want to put all your cool features on
% buttons and mouse driven menus, go for it, but make them accessable
% via keystroke as well.
John S. Dyson writes:
> I am a very serious computer user, developer, and HATE to use the
> mouse or move my hands from the keyboard in any way. If God would
> have meant for us to use a mouse, he would have given us three hands
> :-). I think that my aversion to the mouse has to do with being a
> touch-typist. In my case, a mouse is used as a "mode switch" alot
> like the control or alt keys. It entails needing to reorient my
> hands on the keyboard after use.
And I'm a superficial computer user who never does anything with his
computer but net-surf.
Actually, I'm writing this email message in Emacs VMail mode because it
is the only Email package I know of that lets me do everything I want
with email without moving my hands from the keyboard.
On the other hand, when I'm off web-surfing with Navigator, I have my
hand on the mouse all the time.
You've both missed the obvious distinction that the human being in front
of the computer screen has two modes: creating and editing. When
creating, as in writing a letter or some source code, you want the tool
to flow along with you, to be very transparent. When editing, you want
the tool to help you in jumping around, moving things, etc.
If you were to, for instance, create a graphical tool for system
administrators to create and manage user accounts and groups, it would
be waste of time writing extra code to support keyboard navigation for
something that is an inherently graphical task. For instance, the
"gesture" for adding a user to a group is to "copy" the user from the
"all users" view to the "group: engineering" view, you simply use the
mouse movements for copy, drag, and drop. To expect *any* user to use
tab and arrow keys to select a user, change focus to the group frame,
and drop, is really quite silly. The entire idea of such a tool is to
enable "direct manipulation" of the objects; if you don't want to
directly manipulate the objects, use a more appropriate tool, such as
vipw.
In general, sweeping generalizations such as "never make the user take
his hands off the keyboard" are useless. ;^)
--
"Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?"
Wes Peters Softweyr LLC
http://www.xmission.com/~softweyr softweyr@xmission.com
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