Revisiting "Keyboard vs. The Mouse, pt 1"

Jeff Atwood -

You may know Bruce Tognazzini from his days as Apple Computer employee #66, or perhaps his classic books Tog on Interface and Tog on Software Design. He's still quite relevant today; his list of the ten most persistent UI bugs is an excellent reminder that many of the biggest computer interface problems are still essentially unsolved.

But what I want to talk about today is one particular Ask Tog column from August 1989, which was republished as Chapter 6 of his book Tog on Interface. It's titled Keyboard vs. The Mouse, pt 1. It contains this quote:

We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:
  • Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
  • The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.

This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers' belief that the keyboard is faster.

Let's assume that we're typing some text into a document of some kind, and we wish to save the document we're working on. (I could argue that the user should never have to explicitly save anything, but humor me.) If it seems ridiculous that the mouse method:

  1. Take your right hand off the keyboard
  2. Place your right hand on the mouse
  3. Mouse over to the File menu
  4. Click File
  5. Click Save
  6. Place your right hand back on the keyboard

Could be measurably faster than the keyboard method:

  1. Use your left hand to press Ctrl + S

I assure you that you are not alone. Please defer all your righteous indignation for just a moment.

First, understand that this is a very old quote. In 1989, the current desktop operating systems were Windows 2.0, DOS 4.0, and Mac System 6. The "people new to the mouse" Tog refers to were keyboard holdouts, convinced that the mouse was nothing more than a giant, gimmicky waste of time. I don't think you'll find many users like that around today. Furthermore, I doubt Tog envisioned today's world of main menus with literally thousands of commands, a menu tree – no, a menu forest – so dense that search or some other alternate UI metaphor is the only rational way to navigate it all.

This ancient quote is invariably trotted out during any discussion of keyboard shortcuts, and always for the wrong reasons. The first paragraph is all most people read, so they misunderstand the full meaning. It helps to read the entire column. Tog explains keyboard shortcuts the way modern users understand them just a few short paragraphs later:

And, in fact, I find myself on the opposite side in at least one instance, namely editing. By using Cmd+X, C, and V, the user can select with one hand and act with the other. Two-handed input. Two-handed input can result in solid productivity gains (Buxton 1986).

I don't think anyone would argue that learning keyboard shortcuts is faster than using the mouse to navigate and learn a program. Clearly it isn't – it's quite painful, as anyone who has ever been stranded at a Unix command prompt can probably tell you.

However, as Tog himself notes, when the keyboard shortcut is already memorized and well understood, it's a clear productivity win.

I've long been an advocate of two-fisted computing – using both your keyboard and your mouse to the fullest. That's what keyboard shortcuts are to me. I'm not sure why this always has to be spun as a cage match between the keyboard and the mouse. Keyboard shortcuts don't replace my mousing; they complement it.

In my experience, there's absolutely no question that judicious use of a few keyboard shortcuts will make you faster and more productive. But you don't have to take it from me. Just Ask Tog.