Regardless of the original claims on keyboard versus mouse (there is more recent work on that subject), there are some really nice gems in the article and comments, that are still relevant for current interfaces:
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Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface.
Guideline: The work to design and build the keyboard interface should not sap resources that are needed for the creation of the visual interface.
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Nolan Larsen from WordPerfect Corp. puts it nicely:
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... When scrolling the text horizontally in a window we would refresh the text by redisplaying each line starting at the top. This resulted in a wave of text rippling down the screen, and many complaints that the screen refresh was too slow. The remedy was to scroll the bits already on screen and then redisplay each line from the top. The second implementation was actually slower than the first because we incurred the overhead of scrolling the bits before we even started to display the new text on the screen. However, the perception was that there was an immense increase in speed. We stuck with the second implementation because it increased the overall satisfaction of the user even though it actually decreased the throughput of the product.
In my mind, perception is stronger than reality. A user’s perception of a product is what causes him to purchase it and influences his satisfaction with the product...
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Translating to modern technology, Nolan would express surprise that his irrational users that preferred web pages that displayed text before downloading media, or displayed above-the-fold content before rendering the rest, or liked being able to see welcome message instead of a full-screen loading animation at game startup, because the less-user-friendly version has the optimal "reality" of taking less time to finish an return to idle.
The lessons Nolan got tanalizingly close to discovering were that overall user experience matters more than whatever metric is easiest to measure mechanically, and that sometimes empirical data can disprove a theory. (Ironically, this second lesson was part of the message of Tog's article.).
The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface.
I'm writing this on a borrowed Mac and hating the damn thing (damn mouse-base dreck seriously slows me down).
I would say that because of its keyboard use, the Windows interface is far more effective than the Macintosh interface but that the Mac interface is designed to seem usable. I would suppose something that seems great is exactly what companies should sell for their own benefit. I'm happy that Mac is not yet universal...
You're conflating speed with usability. I'm insanely fast on Windows, to the point where coworkers would make a sort of spectacle out of how fast I can open windows and explore the filesystem and such, but it's just because I know the shortcuts while they fumbled with a mouse.
Windows' keyboard accessibility combined with its responsiveness blows all other OSes out of the water, Gnome is accessible but less responsive, OS X is not accessible but responsive.
OS X is not keyboard-accessible at all, but it's more usable for novice users, as it doesn't confuse them with many options, the UI is cleaner, everything is laid out better, etc. I don't think anyone claims that using OS X is faster per se...
OSX is not keyboard accessible by default, its is not however "not keyboard-accessible". Go into system preferences and turn on keyboard navigation and adjust the keymaps to your hearts content. Heck add scripts to execute on certain key combinations if you want. And if you like you can remap what its defaults are to whatever you like.
OSX is setup to be transparent to novice users. That doesn't mean it cannot be setup to be used with a keyboard. Just that the default, which for 99% of users doesn't allow they keyboard to interfere with a novice user.
I can get OSX to do quite literally everything from the keyboard, I'm not sure how one can argue it isn't keyboard accessible when it is trivial to turn on. And being the 1% of the population that cares about it, power users shouldn't be afraid of learning how to turn it on.
Hopefully this didn't come across as harsh, but I just get annoyed at people that equate OSX = mouse only interface. When you can tell the whole idea behind the interface is to make default things simple to use with a single mouse button and make the rest possible. Despite what we think the actual idea of more than one mouse button is about as foreign as trying to understand Russian to an Englishman. Its more cognitive load than most care about.
I turned it on the moment I ran OS X for the first time. There were still many instances where I actually couldn't tab-navigate to some controls. Not to mention that there are no keyboard accelerators for anything in sight. That aspect alone makes it many times less accessible than Windows/Gnome/KDE.
I haven't used OS X in a few years, so I don't know if things have changed now, but I don't think they have keyboard accelerators nowadays either.
I'll admit I haven't found an application that doesn't let me tab to controls. Sounds like the developer messed up when creating his app or isn't setting the controls properly on the fly.
Can you remember what application it was? I'm curious now and like dumb challenges like this.
> I can get OSX to do quite literally everything from the keyboard,
I call foul on that one.
Perhaps if you said "I can get OSX to eventually do everything from the keyboard". I say that because of the 9 menu items showing for Chrome right now (if one includes the Apple), I can get to exactly one of them using Ctrl-F2. If I wanted to jump to the History menu, it is Ctrl-F2 followed by five right-arrow presses. If I were on Windows, I bet a Euro it would be alt-H or some such.
I just get annoyed at people who think that an option to turn on tabbing onto controls and to hotkey onto the Apple menu (or the dock) somehow equates with the incredible keyboard-friendliness of some other OSes.
So history is Command+Y in chrome by default, though yes if you activated the apple menu and key over I agree thats annoying. Command+H is universally hide window, but you could change it if you were annoyed enough.
Its not just "turn on tabbing onto controls and to hotkey onto the Apple menu". Though I admit, I don't use the menubar from the keyboard as most of the time I just use the shortcuts that activate the menu item.
Don't believe me? You are partially right with the eventually remark however, not all applications allow or even try to have shortcuts for every menu option. Lets add a shortcut to something that doesn't have it in Chrome. I'll choose the extensions menu under Window in Chrome just to be fair as you mentioned the app.
System Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts tab, then Clicky the + button. Choose your Google Chrome.app dir. Then "Extensions" and since I'm trying to not collide with things, I'm using Commmand+Shift+E, and click back and then voila, command shift e gives me the ability to activate what I couldn't before. Works for me and now I never have to click on a menubar either. Or am I just missing a use case in windows where normally the first letter allows you to activate the menu? I admit i've never used that even in windows.
More work than windows by default? Sure. But I'd call that good. As for apps that don't allow tab navigation or other such things, the only one's that seem to be the biggest offenders are browsers. Firefox need a few about:config changes to adjust its retarded on osx default focus behavior and everything is peachy. I've not hit anything I can't do in chrome, Ctrl+tab/etc... cycles tabs etc... Is there something specific you can't do in chrome? Are you referring to the wrench menu perhaps?
On OS X, I can get directly to any menu item by pressing cmd+? and then using the search. This is better if you have a vague idea of what you want, although admittedly, Windows has a better implementation for keyboard browsing of menu items. I vastly prefer the former, though.
The former is preferable for complex applications such as photoshop, but the latter is absolutely indispensable for frequently-used applications, as it's much faster.
Actually in Windows the application specific shortcuts often start with Ctrl. In this case Ctrl+H takes you to the history tab. Doesn't something like that work on OS X?
No, and that was my complaint. The post by pdhborges below enlightened me that one can use letters after pressing Ctrl-F2, but it is still quite awkward and I believe it is disruptive to flow.
Three keystrokes, the first of which is awkward and the rest of which are menu-dependent. In other OSes it's just alt+accelerator, for anything you want.
OS X/Cocoa includes some Emacs-style key bindings by default (see http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/system-bindings.html), so I don't think leaving other key shortcuts out makes the keyboard "interfere with a novice user" as you say. Dialog boxes don't support keyboard accelerators other than Esc and Enter, and the Finder doesn't support things like cut-and-paste or opening folders with the Enter key, and I find these things incredibly frustrating having used Windows in the past. Try doing something simple like moving a file from a directory to its parent in Finder versus Explorer.
Oh man, moving a file to its parent. You'd basically have to copy it, go up (I'm not sure if backspace goes up, does it?), paste it, find the folder again, go back down (or just back, i guess), find the file and delete it.
A clusterfuck, I can't fathom how some people can actually argue at length that OS X is fantastically keyboard-accessible.
I've used unix os's for longer than I have windows, I consider the terminal to be "keyboard-accessible". You can argue that point if you like, but the terminal is always a command tab away. That with osascript and the open command means i don't have much use for Finder. If I could keep Finder from restarting it wouldn't even be running on my system.
I use WindowMaker with tons of custom keyboards shortcuts using the windows key : win+x to open an xterm, win+n to open a text editor, etc. I also use a lot alt+Functions keys to minimize, maximize, switch windows to back or to front... I can do about anything without ever touching the mouse. BTW a massive pain I have with Firefox 4 is that the F6 key doesn't select the URL bar anymore, this is a huge usability drawback.
I use Gnome and have set the same shortcuts, it's great but it takes a while for the file manager to open and respond, for example. Windows Explorer (especially under XP) just flies in comparison.
By the way, why are you using F6? The standard shortcut is ctrl+l, as far as I know, and it's much closer than F6.
Gnome is slow... I use Rox as a file manager. I'm used to F6 because it worked on all platforms. Ctrl+I doesn't work on a Mac. Strangely, F6 still work on the Mac, but not on Linux.
" Guideline: The keyboard interface must not dictate the design of the visual interface.
Guideline: The work to design and build the keyboard interface should not sap resources that are needed for the creation of the visual interface. "
Nolan Larsen from WordPerfect Corp. puts it nicely:
" ... When scrolling the text horizontally in a window we would refresh the text by redisplaying each line starting at the top. This resulted in a wave of text rippling down the screen, and many complaints that the screen refresh was too slow. The remedy was to scroll the bits already on screen and then redisplay each line from the top. The second implementation was actually slower than the first because we incurred the overhead of scrolling the bits before we even started to display the new text on the screen. However, the perception was that there was an immense increase in speed. We stuck with the second implementation because it increased the overall satisfaction of the user even though it actually decreased the throughput of the product.
In my mind, perception is stronger than reality. A user’s perception of a product is what causes him to purchase it and influences his satisfaction with the product... "