jjl@... (John J. Lee) writes:
> Seriously for a moment, I read something recently (maybe here?) about
> an Apple study that claimed to show that people who perceived keyboard
> bindings as being much faster than mouseing did not, on average, take
> less time to complete the actions that were studied (they took more
> time, in fact). The plausible explanation for this was that people's
> subjective perception of time is affected by the greater mental work
> involved in typing (as opposed to mousing) for a given action.
I think mousing takes more mental work than typing, and that's why it
subjectively seems slower even if a stopwatch shows it to be faster.
I have IM text chats with my officemate all the time even though he's
sitting about 4 feet away from me and I could easily talk to him and
that would probably be faster. But text chat needs less mental effort
since it doesn't take my attention away from symbols on the screen,
i.e. when the chat topic is something simple, I don't lose mental
context of the program I'm working on and then have to spend time
getting the context back. In that sense, text chats save time
compared with regular conversations even though they're slower.
Of course if the chat subject gets complicated and starts needing
careful thought, then it's better to switch to conversation, and
sometimes we both simultaneously realize that and start talking to
each other or using the whiteboard.
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