Re: PBX alternative?
Re: PBX alternative?
- Subject: Re: PBX alternative?
- From: Kirk Kerekes <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 12:23:56 -0500
I remember when this same debate was raging within Digital 15-20 years
ago as DEC came out with some of the first visual keypad editors.
The debate was finally settled by a carefully designed human
factors study that revealed a surprising result:
Many people who use advanced or complex features of their
editing environment (like specialized keyboard shortcuts)
think they are fast when in fact they are not. It takes
more mental processing time to choose these arcane commands.
Yes, and this study was _replicated_ and _confirmed_ by Apple HID people in
the early days of the Mac OS.
Conclusion: keyboard "shortcut" users, on average, take longer to
accomplish a given task than equally proficient mouse/menu/button users.
Period.
No significant exceptions. The more keyboard commands you use, the less
productive you are.
However, the keyboard command users universally _believe_ that they are
_faster_ than the mousers, even when faced with concrete, indisputable
evidence to the contrary. This is an extremely difficult belief to shake.
This erroneous belief is the basis for Window's emphasis on keyboard
commands in their GUI, because unlike the MacOS, Windows was not designed
on a foundation of UI laboratory research, but instead was just copied and
modified by people with no particular UI expertise.
The reason for the difference between _perceived_ speed and actual speed
has to do with the intensity of the task: remembering and executing a
keystroke command sequence is a difficult, un-natural task that fully
engages the brain (no matter how automatic it may seem to become) while
pointing-and-clicking is a low-sweat task that leaves the brain free to
perceive the passage of time.
So keystroke users never "feel" the time passing that they waste^H^H^H^H^H
spend remembering and entering keystroke commands. The same users feel like
they are "wasting time" when they mouse-around in a GUI, when in fact they
are actually being more productive.
Of course, you will never convince a hard-core emacs/vi user of this,
because they have wasted^H^H^H^H^H^H invested too much time learning the
key bindings, and regard mousing as lowly "luser" technique.
However, as a person who is willing to accept facts and use them to modify
my behavior, I abandoned keystroke commands a long time ago, with great
benefit to my general productivity.
And I won't get CTS anywhere near as soon.
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