At Home with John and Debbie

The old Mac vs PC one-mouse-button vs two-mouse-buttons “debate” is raging once again over on Slashdot.

I’ll quickly state my position on that: the best mouse driven interfaces I’ve used are Sun’s OpenWindows (now very obscure) and Acorn’s RISC OS (which was always pretty niche too). Both mapped three mouse buttons to the functions “select” (what Windows and Mac users expect a “normal” mouse click to do), “adjust” (analogous to shift-click in Windows - adjusting an existing selection) and “menu” (bring up a context-sensitive menu).

Annoyingly, Sun and Acorn mapped the buttons differently, but either way, this makes for a clean desktop (putting everything in a context menu means to clutter from menu bars) and for very rapid access to whatever actions you need. If you hold a mouse between your thumb and little finger, your remaining three fingers naturally rest on the three buttons. The advent of the scroll wheel (which is just a special middle button) means three remains the natural choice.

Most UNIX GUIs need three buttons to work properly: but I’m not sure how much thought went into those choices.

But aside from my personal preference, what irritates me most about these debates is the constant references to “a computer my mum can use” or “my grandad needs to be able to understand it”, as if as soon as you pass 50 you’re incapable of learning the simplest thing. It’s easy for those of us who’ve used computers for years to forget that nothing about computer interfaces is intuitive. There is learning to be done, people of all ages learn things all the time, and frankly “there are two mouse buttons, one does this, the other does that” is a far easier lesson than the one where you explain the difference between files and folders.

Drawing analogies between computers and cars is a hackneyed device, but I’ll go ahead anyway. Cars are designed so that every function you need while driving is within intant reach of your fingers. The price you pay is that you have to spend a while learning, taking driving lessons, before you’re fluent in all the necessary aspects of the car’s control. If you made a “one mouse button” version of the car’s control system, it would take so long to apply the brakes that you’d never make it out of your parking space in one piece.

Once you’ve learned to drive a car, the interface is all but invisible. You focus on the corner, not the steering wheel. When I’m driving a computer, I want to focus on the picture I’m drawing, the program I’m writing, the text I’m creating, the accounts I’m balancing, not on the interface. I’d rather a more complex interface which becomes fluent with experience, than an easy to learn interface which always gets in the way.

Some extremes that I personally use:
vi (a text editor) - agony to learn, but supremely productive once learnt
iPod - some quirks aside, learned in minutes, but functions that should be conveniently accessible are always an inconvenient number of precise scrolls and clicks away.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2005 at 13:41 and is filed under Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.