Xref: utzoo sci.psychology:1191 comp.cog-eng:701
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!andrea
From: andrea@hp-sdd.HP.COM (Andrea K. Frankel)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology,comp.cog-eng
Subject: Re: Wanted: references to computer mouse usage studies
Message-ID: <1761@hp-sdd.HP.COM>
Date: 13 Dec 88 21:12:11 GMT
References: <5119@whuts.ATT.COM> <148@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu>
Reply-To: andrea@hp-sdd.UUCP (Andrea K. Frankel)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard, San Diego Division
Lines: 52

In article <148@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu> STAT02@YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu writes:
>It has been my experience that females
>more frequently take a longer time to become comfortable using a mouse.
>(whether this has a cultural or biological basis, I don't know, and
>frankly my dear, I don't give a damn :-). I was also struck, in a set of
>letters published in one of those glossy trade journals on the sins /
>virtues of mouse usage, that a larger percentage of the cons were from
>females.

I'd be interested in seeing more on this.  As a formerly_rodent_avoidant
female, my objections were

1)  I type well and quickly (tested at 120 wpm some years back) and
therefore am more comfortable with keyboard-oriented tools (such as vi)
than with mouse-oriented ones (such as Windows Write).

2)  the assignment of operations to mouse buttons is far from
standardized, and changes from tool to tool and environment to
environment.  

3)  the mouse is physically uncomfortable to use for any length of time.

What changed my mind?  MS Windows and the HP HIL mouse.  This mouse has
a large dome on which to rest the palm, making it more comfortable
(especially for small hands).  MSWindows, while it has its problems,
makes it simple to learn the mappings of mouse actions (probably because
it only uses one button, and the meaning of single and double click is
consistent across applications).  I learned that system much more
quickly than the X interface's window manager.

Also, the convention in MS Windows of having "accelerators" (enabling
one to type sequences of <alt>(letter)+ to simulate mouse access to the
pulldown menus, and function key mappings built in for common functions
such as "find next") leaves it up to the user as to how much they use
the mouse vs. how much they type.  I can attain greater speeds using
a combination of mouse and keyboard than using either predominantly.

There was a blurb in the newspaper recently, and also in Science News I
believe, reporting that the spatial-vs-verbal skill tradeoff varied in
women according to their hormonal levels in a regular monthly cycle.  It
would be interesting to try "mouse acceptance tests" on non-mouse-using
women and see if there was any correlation with where they were in their
menstrual cycle!


Andrea Frankel, Hewlett-Packard (San Diego Division) (619) 592-4664
                "...I brought you a paddle for your favorite canoe."
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