Mousing Around: Tyrannasaurus Rodentia Plasticae

The following "game plan" missed proper shredding. The crumpled, top-secret paper fragment appeared in a plastic trash bag with brochures and paraphernalia linking it to a popular late-20th century CD-ROM game publisher. A small team of cultural anthropologists uncovered the document in the year 2056 while researching a old California landfill site (formerly a "garbage dump"). They were researching computer history, by the way.

"Story line, $5 million budget MUD (Multiuser Dungeons type game). For release December 1996.

"With the advent of the mouse input device (Rodentia Plasticae), life on planet earth forever changed. Homo sapiens no longer depended solely on frail, fatigue-prone finger tips to control their savage computers. Limited memories no longer had to regurgitate long commands to feed their rapacious screen prompts. The advent of point-and-click heralded the dawn of a new age. Mousing around brought profit.

"However, against this new, bright sun stood one lone, shadowed, bearded figured. They called him "OB-1." (Although it sounded like Obi-Wan, it signified "the Objective One".) Tightly wrapped in robe and hood, this prophet (some said) dared speak out 'Tyrannasaurus,' against the revered Rodentia Plasticae. History later recorded that OB-1 alone was the first human to identify this most subtle guise of the eternal foe: cryptodesign."

THE MOUSE IN ITS PLACE: FUZZY WUZZY Consider the icon. Some icons were meant to be moved around on the screen (see our GUI column for the January/February issue).

We can drag the document icon onto the folder icon. We drop one folder on top another folder. We shove documents and folders into the trash or recycle bin. Likewise, take the "window" object. Yes, take it--and move it. Or point and click on a partially hidden window and bring it forward into full view. We interact with these objects almost as we do with paper and folders on our desks. These graphical interactions let us organize our work into hierarchical schemes unburdened with verbal commands. We eliminate learning new paradigms by using these metaphors. We take action nonverbally through direct manipulation. The mouse truly gives a fuzzy wuzzy feeling to computers.

CRYPTOMOUSE SNEAK ATTACK When preparing a Macintosh version of our GUI seminar several years ago, we explored some Mac applications. We found an anomaly: we could not TAB to a radio button ("option button") or a check box! Afraid this may have been idiosyncratic to the application, we called an Apple human factors staff member. He laughed, and said "yes, we know that's a problem. We need to enter data too. The Mac can't tab to radio buttons or check boxes until we change some things at the core of the operating system. That'll take a major revision." Conclusion--the Mac is "mouse-centric." Although we did get this recommendation: use "type select," i.e., underscore one of the letters in the radio button label to create an accelerator key. Then, users could select the option with "Command key + letter key." However, this solution lacks compelling motivation. Chorded key strokes (two at once) bring high error rates and slow down input speed when compared to pressing the tab key.