Re: [Usability] triple mouse click behavior

[Maurizio Colucci <seguso forever tin it>]

> >* when the user needs to do something uncommon (e.g. play a music 8 hours
> >from
> >now, burn a CD from a cue sheet), he doesn't know where to look.
> > Frustration.
>
> And when the user needs to do something common, it's buried in an amazingly
> long list of other tasks, 

yes...

> so they can't find anything anyway.   

non sequitur.  They can, by scanning the list with their eyes, or by narrowing 
the list it by keyword (see below).

> frustration. 

no frustration. They are learning so they are not concerned about speed of 
execution.

In the learning phase you have to understand what the program can do and 
quickly find HOW TO DO it. Not DO it quickly; quickly find out how to do it. 
There is a big difference. In that phase, scanning a long list is not a 
problem, because you are not concerned about speed of execution. The 
important thing, in that phase, is that it must be obvious WHERE TO LOOK for 
the option. i.e. in which list you will find what you need. 

How to obtain that? The answer is clear if we observe from a cognitive point 
of view:

1) the idea is first formed in the brain of the user (in an internal language 
called "mentalese" in literature). 

2) the user immediately translates it into english. e.g. "I want to narrow the 
text width", "I want to increase the space between the lines"

3) the user wants to find out how to tell the program what he wants to do. 
Now, with the traditional toolbar/menu/dialogs approach, he is forced to scan 
nearly all the dialogs, almost exhaustively, with his eyes. Failure.

What can must be done to fix it? We can use the fact that the idea is already 
in his mind, translated for free into english. We put a flat list with all 
the things that can be done, unstructured, and make it searchable by keyword. 
This way you solve all the learnability problems: 1) the user immediately 
knows where to look for anything (in that list) 2) the user immediately knows 
whether and how a given thing can be done. 

To render the searching time irrelevant, the just enters some keywords (which 
he already knows) and the list narrows to show only the actions that are 
related to the keywords (syntactically and semantically of course).

Now, the fact that this is not in your schoolbooks does not imply you 
shouldn't be able to grasp it at the third attempt. Your solution (SHIFT+ 
ARROWS) has obvious learnability problems I won't even state.

>  > The consequence of this kind of reasoning is that 80% MSWord users don't
> use
>
> >styles, but keep formatting each paragraph explicitely.
>
> Do you have a citation to back up your claim that '80% [of] MSWord users
> don't use styles'?  

Sorry, I don't have many schoolbooks.

> Further, do you have any citations that show that any 
> sizeable percentage of MSWord users actually have a need (whether they
> realise it or not) to use styles?

You can't be serious here.

Maurizio