[Usability]Re: Right Click the same as Ctrl+LeftClick???

["Curtis C. Hovey" <sinzui cox net>]

On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 05:42, Tom Insam wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 00:26, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > That means we'd totally knock out ctrl-click for any other use. Plus, we'd
> > be ignoring the many existing methods for providing mouse buttons 2 and 3 on
> > systems that don't generally have them (on Mac hardware, you use the
> > keyboard to emulate them).
> 
> How about click and hold? I'm not a Mac person, but I've seen Macs that
> do this. And I've seen it on handhelds. It would certianly help the
> Tablet situation..
> 
> It also has the advantage that it clashes with almost nothing else I can
> think of. I suppose there are clashes with dragging, but that can be
> fixed the same way the context menus used to be handled.

No Mac user ever discovered ctrl-click on their own.  My wife refuses to
use it and my daughter can't.  The click-and-hold used by old Netscape
was nice, but I must have failed usability tests for Apple to ignore it
when it officially added context menus (in 8.0?).  It is not natural to
use two devices to get a context menu, the mouse needs to do it on it's
own.  To add a ctrl-left-click to do what the Mac user does, doesn't
make sense in itself because the user has to discover what the other two
or three buttons do anyway; how does the Mac user know to use the left
mouse?

-- 
__C U R T I S  C.  H O V E Y____________________
sinzui cox net
Guilty of stealing everything I am.

---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]