I was a little groggy when I waited in line for breakfast at the Orange County Airport’s McDonald’s. I noticed the cash registers at Mickey D’s have become far more sophisticated than they used to be; indeed, they are more or less commodity PCs. The only thing different is there is no mouse.
I began thinking about how a cashier would fare having to line up and push a mouse around the screen every time she entered orders. It would take twice as long to take an order, at least! Computer mice aren’t as easy to use from a standing position as they are from a seated one (in my opinion, anyway).
This brings me further into my longstanding issues with a lot of computer interfaces. For all the marketing that went into them, the mouse-and-menu model is spectacularly clumsy. There is little intuitive in steering a mouse around to get what you want. A substantial amount of movement and thought must go into translating those hand movements into a place on the screen.
That’s when I realized how efficient touch screens are. Tablet PCs and PDAs use touch screens. Most use them to an advantage, though not all. My Sharp Zaurus has a brain-dead, menu-driven interface which likely played a role in killing it as a product. Good touch screen interfaces eliminate the translation step of hand movements-equate-to-pointer. The user might not be consciously aware of this mouse-work, but it nevertheless is there, potentially adding stress to her work.
There is little thought wasted in poking a button on a screen to make something happen. Over eons humans have learned that poking something is a good way to provoke a reaction. Interfaces designed to take advantage of this let users get right to the point (no pun intended). Such users spend their time doing their work rather than fighting a mouse.
To summarize: The computer mouse beats typing, but still isn’t as easy as a touch-screen. Interfaces overflowing with menus are bad. Let out the caveman in your users by making your interface caveman easy.
IBM added light pens to their 3270 displays in the 70s. They allowed the creation of “light pen selectable fields”. The idea was that menus could be easily selected without having to play with the “arrow keys”. They envisioned chaining through complex mainframe menus to do any work on a site. (Of course this was an all mainframe CICS/IMS world.)
While working with some field engineers in Raleigh, I finaly saw this modern marvel in action. The “FE” was researching a problem, closing related problems, and putting in explanations of preliminary work. He was very familiar with the system and worked very quickly. He would type, tab, hit the enter key, moving through the system rapidly. When he came to a menu that required the light pen, he would stop, shake his head (with this sort of whoa, EXITING ZONE look), then he would ruffle through papers until he found the line running to the light pen. He would then pull it in, hand over hand, until he retrieved it from wherever he had thrown it last time. He would then select the field and chuck it to a random slot on his desk, and resume his “typing in the zone”. I worked with him 30 minutes or so and he hit this menu 3 times. It was all that I could do to keep from falling on the floor laughing.
I suppose that there are people who feel that stopping thier “mousing” to type blows them out of the zone; but, I don’t know any of them…