user experience
Despite Apple's historical insistence that the computer mouse should only have one button-- which led to the highly unfortunate convention of double-clicking-- most mice have more than one button today. In his classic book The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin revisits the earliest days of his involvement with the
human-computer interaction
Fitts' Law is arguably the most important formula in the field of human-computer interaction. It's.. Time = a + b log2 ( D / S + 1 ) .. where D is the distance from the starting point of the cursor, and S is the width of the target. This is all considered on
trackpoint
When it comes to pointing devices on laptops, there are two schools of thought. There's the touchpad.. .. and there's the trackpoint, which was popularized by IBM thinkpads: I recently switched to a work-provided Thinkpad T40 as my primary laptop, and it has both trackpoint and touchpad--
hardware interfaces
The standard computer keyboard is the quintessential human input device. Although it's amazingly adaptable, a recent Tom's Hardware review of the Ergodex DX1 underscores the limitations of the keyboard as an input device-- and also highlights some of the crazier keyboard alternatives out there: So far,