Re: Of mice and men

Ah, a considered response...:-)

comments below...

"jce" <defaultuser@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:3Pvde.25291$716.2607@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> I don't think they are conclusive as the test is somewhat contrived.
>
Yes, I agree. It had to be because it is a very narrow single case. I said
as much.

> 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 :-)

You can acually put the cursor onto any of the fields (with the mouse) and
it will then fill that field, and filling in six or any number of fields is
not a problem.
>
> It actually was quicker for me to use the keyboard 17 seconds to 10
seconds
> for the dates I had.

Ah, some solid data. :-)Thanks for that. It took me 28 seconds with the
keyboard, but I'm not proficient with numeric keypads and was using a
notebook which has this function integrated onto other keys, thus rendering
it virtually useless. (It took me 21 seconds with the mouse, using a
baseline that was designed to deliberately force maximum mouse movement.)

I wonder... did you write the dates onto a piece of paper, then enter them,
or did you simply make up some dates as you went along? See, one of the
problems with entering them as digits is that you must mentally convert the
month to a number before you can enter it. For example, "September, 1979".
This requires a thought process before you can arrive at 0979. My experience
is that SOME pople have no problem with this, but others do. (I mentioned
the case where one girl counted months with her tongue on her teeth...(the
wondrous diversity of Human Beings... :-)).

> This was skewed by the fact that I knew what the dates
> were going to be before I began.

Precisely. I've decided to post some baseline data to the page and I will
definitely fix it so that it works in any Browser. (As there have been more
than a couple of dozen accesses to it, this is worth doing. Also, it will be
good for me to correct some sloppy coding in Javascript that relies on IE
instead of the standard. I need to break some bad habits I have developed.)

>
> 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.
>

Yes. I think all of that has been covered. I'm wondering how much that is
simply getting used to another way of doing things.

> 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 appreciate your honesty and fairness in this appraisal. It is not my
intention to cause pain to anyone's rear end here; I did this in a spirit of
genuine enquiry and because I was pissed off with Gavan. As it progressed,
the enquiry took over from the pissed offness. I was genuinely surprised
with the result.

> 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.

Hahaha! Fair comment. :-) I have been pulled up a couple of times on this
Browser incompatibility thing and it is right and proper that I should
address it. Part of the problem is that I simply won't run two Browsers on
my system because I did this once many years ago and it caused a disaster
that I have never forgotten. Therefore, I can't test in a non-MS
environment. I posted the page in good faith because it works correctly when
I look at it.

>
> 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.
>

And at least you have thought about it and experimented with it. I
appreciate that.

> 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 :-)

Yes, I know. I already considered that and noted it. The scope was to
duplicate the exact entry that Gavan provides on his application. He doesn't
use autoskip (for whatever reasons, none of my business and I really don't
care), so I didn't either.

4 digits, then TAB. That is the requirement. Actually, even if you allowed
the autoskip, it is still 18 clicks as opposed to 24 key depressions.

It is indisputable that there are fewer clicks than key depressions; that is
axiomatic. The question then becomes, does it take longer to do 18 mouse
clicks than to do 30 (or 24, if you like) key depressions. Results have
varied, just as I expected they would. This seems to bear out what I have
come to think of as "Richard's theorem", namely, we all prefer what we are
used to.

Thanks for a fair and considered post, that actually provided some useful
data.

Pete.



.

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