Quoting Carl Fink (c...@finknetwork.com): > On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 07:54:11PM -0500, rlhar...@oplink.net wrote: > > > Eventually, at the stroke of midnight on 31 December A.D. 1999, M$ Word > > 5.0 for DO$ began writing garbage to the data files. This is one of the > > very few genuine "Y2K" bugs. M$ had no patch, but offered instead a free > > copy of Word 5.5. But who in his right mind would migrate to 5.5? Word > > 5.0 was the last version of Word for DO$ which could be used without aid > > of the rodent, and a rodent is anathema to efficiency. > > This is not supported by evidence, e.g. > <http://facweb.cs.depaul.edu/sjost/csc423/examples/anova/efficiency.pdf>
I'm struggling to see how this reference backs up your assertion. The use-case is not word-processing (Word) where both hands are expected to be on the keys most of the time. This study prepared the hands on the mouse (for the mouse method) in advance (penultimate paragraph). This might be sensible if you were dealing with Illustrator/CorelDraw etc but not word processing. Looking at the size of some toolbars nowadays, and the proportion of real estate left for the text, it's arguable that the desirability of a toolbar is moot. So the very last sentence supports the keyboard. Moving back to the antepenultimate paragraph, 90 trials might be an adequate number for some ad hoc banking application involving US states, but can hardly be considered adequate for a power-user (like RLH) of a textual application where individual commands that have been used hundreds of times will be typed without any conscious effort at all, rather like a pianist plays ornaments. > Jacob Nielsen has argued that people _feel_ more efficient using just the > keyboard, but objective measurements don't agree. This statement has no context by which to judge it. Cheers, David.
