UI design by committee
Hans-Martin Mosner
hmm at heeg.de
Mon Feb 28 21:20:46 UTC 2005
Tim Rowledge wrote:
>Basically, three buttons is a good number for mouse buttons since you
>can hold the mouse with littlefinger and thumb and use three fingers for
>buttons. Assuming of course that the mouse if physically well designed
>and believe me most of them are not. Scrollwheels? Yuck. If you have
>three buttons, use them sensibly.
>
>So, that's the outline of why three buttons are good and why the menu
>should be on the middle button.
>
>
>
Tim, you're the man!
The first "real" mice I've worked with were ugly as hell (looked like a
half-sphere with buttons attached to the front) but passed the main
usability tests:
- they had 3 buttons
- could be held with rounded fingers (your hand grips around the mouse
instead of resting flat on it)
That was so much easier on the hand than anything else which I met
afterwards.
Another idiocy which I'll never understand is mouse acceleration. It
breaks muscle memory, a main factor of mouse usability.
And don't get me started about optical mice! Not the good ones I saw at
Xerox SIS which would work perfectly well on any structured surface, but
the crap that became commercially available later... Even relatively new
(2 yrs) logitech mice have such a jumpy positioning behavior that it's
almost impossible to accurately select small-font text. Give me a good
rubber-coated steel ball any time.
Cheers,
Hans-Martin
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