Re: Of mice and men


I don't think they are conclusive as the test is somewhat contrived.

However, not to spoil the fun, your date picker is not typical of what you
would see and in the particular case is not too shabby. The problem is that
this date picker wouldn't normally work for a screen where you would need to
fill in SIX dates...as you would need to indicate which particular field it
was on....I notice you don't have a delete date for the mouse :-)

It actually was quicker for me to use the keyboard 17 seconds to 10 seconds
for the dates I had. This was skewed by the fact that I knew what the dates
were going to be before I began.

One issue that I have is that the date fields require me to be accurate with
the mouse. I "missed" on a couple of occasions. Another issue that I have
is that the mouse picker required far more motion to move. For dates I
generally use the num pad which allows me access to all numbers with very
little motion and is therefore quicker.

So inconclusion I would say that the keyboard is still faster - however, the
date picker in this particular test would more than likely win me over
because it is "right there" and is easily accessible. If this was a sharp
fence my rear end would be in pain.

I think the point that you have proved is three fold:
Web surfing sucks if you don't use Microsoft vanilla browsing because stuff
doesn't work.
Web surfing sucks if you use Microsoft vanilla browsing because stuff works
that you don't want.

For those of us willing to switch from Netscape for one person's test:
There are ways where point and click "can" be more effective than keyboard
but it is depends. At least it's a different approach that with some
modification might work.

I actually don't mind month drop down boxes because I can get the month with
1 key press unless it's May :-)

Just FYI - if you autotabbed then it would only be 24 keys :-)

JCE



"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3dmffpF6r0ie2U1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Having successfully run BOTH sets of tests, I know that the results are
> conclusive (it surprised me). However, I would expect other people to get
> a
> different result because none of us is aware of how our subconscious
> affects our behaviour when we do these tests. (I may have tried harder in
> one test than I did in the other... I don't think I did, but the whole
> point
> about subconscious is that we are not aware of it.)
>
> For this to be really scientific we would need a baseline of data and a
> group of normal users with little or no programming experience, across a
> spectrum of ages and backgrounds.
>
> I got someone else to try it and the results were pretty close to my own.
>
> If I get time tomorrow, I'll post some base data to the page (at least one
> of the tests I used was designed to stretch mouse movement) and people can
> try entering THAT data (if they are so inclined... :-)) Results can then
> be
> compared in a more meaningful way.
>
> Pete.
>
>
>


.

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