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Balancing Use Between the Keyboard and Mouse?
initialE wonders: "A friend of mine, working for a bank, mentioned to me that she had just undergone training for the migration of applications from their legacy systems (think DOS-based interface, AS400 powered) to a snazzy new web application. Whereas the younger users were impressed by the bling it provided, the older users were less happy, and the reason provided was that the application lacked shortcut keys to doing their most common tasks. The newer staff were mighty pleased not to have to learn all those arcane commands, of course. This led me to consider a few things. I administer Windows-based systems, and more and more I am choosing to use whatever key-based interface is available - I don't even use the file explorer anymore, preferring to type 'WindowsKey+R', and typing in the file path (Windows helps with auto-complete). It's better for me to keep my hands on the keyboard and not touch the mouse. It's certainly not because my mouse is bad, I just don't want to release the focus on the keyboard. And it works - I get things done a lot faster than anyone else in my department. Have we placed too much emphasis on making GUI-based applications, and left behind what was a perfectly good way of doing things?"
This is a classic example of Easy to Use VS Easy to Learn.
Modern UI designers have an unfair bias towards designing for the new user. The emphasis is to make the new user get up to speed as painlessly as possible. In other words, the design of the inerface should cater for "Easy to Learn". This is a fundamental principle in modern user interface design.
Now. "Easy to Use" is not the same thing as "Easy to Learn". They are not necessarily orthongonal, but they tend to be. So while your new graphical application is easy to learn for the new user, the experienced power user finds it cumbersome to use. Note that a easy to use application can take a long time to master. For example, all the short cut keys in your old application requires effort and time to memorize.
The standard argument is that if the application is hard to learn, people won't buy it. Therefore, if we need to sacrifice ease of use, for the sake of ease of learning, so be it.
Ah, the age old debate between GUIs and CLIs.
This isn't anything new. People have been discussing this for a long time. It's pretty well known that GUIs are better for some tasks and CLIs are better for others. Rather than trying to proclaim that one is dead, people really should work on making them work better together.
Anyhow. Until people start making more advances in that arena, in the meantime, I've found that using a keyboard with an integrated TrackPoint works great. (You can find old IBM ones on eBay or get some from pckeyboards.com.) Any modern OS supports multiple input pointing devices, so if you need to do a lot of mousing but only a little bit of typing, you still can have a normal mouse available to you. If, however, you need to do a lot of typing but only a little bit of mousing, you can keep your fingers at your keyboard the whole time. It's the best of both worlds, and I think all keyboards should come like this.