- I use my mouse without thinking
- aiming breaks your thinking process, you are not anymore focused on what you are working on but rather on how you want to do it
- when you manipulate text you shouldn't bother about pixels.
- when you aim for a specific portion of a text to highlight and copy or remove, you only care about the text, not it's position on the screen.
- my mouse has a lot of button, I can do a lot with it
- 1 mouse with 2 buttons and 1 hand
- 1 keyboard with more than 40 buttons and 2 hands
- I am very fast with my mouse
- if you are it means that your mouse speed is probably high so you probably have to focus more while you aim meaning losing more attention on the task you are conducting
- there is a non negligible distance between your keyboard and your mouse, even if you are fast, the more you repeat it, the longer it still is
- I don't use my computer a lot
- obviously the less you interact with a computer the less it will impact you
- yet one could ponder if he or she would actually use a computer more if it were to be more efficient with it
- i.e. the less efficient you are, the lower your return on investment thus the less motivating it is to go on
- like touch typing, one has to estimate if spending time on the learning process worth it
- language is multidimensional
- visual interfaces are (usually) limited to 2 dimensions
- it is extremely complex (if even possible) to represent highly dimensional objects visually
- note that this could be idealized too. The UNIX philosophy by the author of pipe "Do one thing but do it well" and its intrinsically modular nature is not necessarily applied to every command line or language-based tool.
Overall I think it's a huge step backward. Language is a very powerful tool that goes very well alongside drawing but the two are not interchangeable. A designer drawing is working on a 2D landscape, most of the time the rest of us are not.
To include
- study on the impact if touchscreens
- you must have direct access to it and manipulate it without bothering about how it is being formatted working on the text, not the disposition of the text to access to the text
- in the end you are probably being less efficient than you ideally could
- in general, independently of yours or my current ability
- when you aim at a word your cursor is relatively to it at a random position
- you never know if your pointer will be close or far away from the next word you will have to select
- you might even (probably) forget where the pointer is
- being a physical movement, the surface and tidiness of the mouse will change its behavior
- uncertainty = cognitively costly
- step by step process
- leave the keyboard
- locate mouse
- handle mouse
- locate pointer
- translate the current pointer position to the desired position
- actually applying the action (clicking, selecting, drag&drop, ...)
- move back to they keyboard
- problem is not absolute time it takes but rather the impact on your attention/focus
- hard to
- synchronize
- conduct sub-second actions
- combine a lot of components
- abstract complex set of components and actions
- overall scale up in complexity
<< I just think "I wanna click there, and my hand moves the mouse without thinking about it" Not thinking about technology represents the peak of technology. You don't want to think about your use of technology. >>
See also
Fabien Benetou's PIM
