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To: Jonathan Bird who wrote (13761)	5/18/1998 3:39:00 PM
From: Adam Nash	Respond to of 213182

46% of the time!! Are you kidding me? Thats almost as bad as guessing! Whoever these "most people" are I suppose they dont even have the faculties necessary to type. A keyboard has a lot more then 2 buttons you know. What about using a water facet? Those have two nobs. Someone mentioned earlier about a one button mouse being easier for kids. These people have apparenlty never looked at the controller for and childrens video system which has like 10 buttons for application specific functions. Six of which are controlled buy the thumb alone. Children probably get this stuff easier then adults. Even lab rats can learn to use two buttons with an accuracy better then 46%. Jon Bird You'd be surprised. A lot of errors are made that people don't consider errors because they don't do anything wrong or they are easily recoverable. Also, the 46% may be innaccurate - it's the number I remember, but it may have been for one specific task (most Parc tests were for things like cut & paste, etc). The point is people aren't actively thinking about how to use the computer, they are thinking about what they are doing. All of your examples, though, completely do not apply to the situation of using a pointing device to manipulate an on-screen image. They are all different control environments, with different expectations, functions, and prior-knowledge levels. Anyway, we can drop it for the benefit of the investment discussion. This isn't the "Let's all learn human-interaction design methodology" message board. However, you did hit something very accurate - this was done mainly on novice users - ie, users without prior experience. When you have prior experience, it swamps natural results. Also, you hit upon another truth. Somehow, people associate "novice" with "young". With computers, nothing could be further from the truth. Watch a 10-year old play Quake II, all the controls they manipulate, etc, and you will know that they haven't been novice for years. People who are currently 40+ are most likely to lack the prior experience to effectively use complicated control schemes.