One thing that I believe most people don't want to take into account in their assessment of a UI is how quickly a user can perform a particular action. People nag and complain about the right-click interface (because people aren't used to it), yet Fitts' Law makes it clear that context menus are much faster than menus along screen edges. Though, a menu bar at the top of the screen (MacOS) has been shown to yield 5x faster access times than the goofy method of having the menu bar 10-20 pixels below the top of the screen or attached to the current window (Windows). If you continually access a particular menu item, as is common in graphics work, saving an extra second per access really can accumulate throughout a project or even a single day's work. Just because you initially find it "awkward" doesn't mean that you couldn't benefit from learning it, and therefore no longer find it awkward.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the "physics" of cubic cows explained in this song and lecture, http://www.rathergood.com/zoology.
One thing that I believe most people don't want to take into account in their assessment of a UI is how quickly a user can perform a particular action. People nag and complain about the right-click interface (because people aren't used to it), yet Fitts' Law makes it clear that context menus are much faster than menus along screen edges. Though, a menu bar at the top of the screen (MacOS) has been shown to yield 5x faster access times than the goofy method of having the menu bar 10-20 pixels below the top of the screen or attached to the current window (Windows). If you continually access a particular menu item, as is common in graphics work, saving an extra second per access really can accumulate throughout a project or even a single day's work. Just because you initially find it "awkward" doesn't mean that you couldn't benefit from learning it, and therefore no longer find it awkward.