Of Mice & Motor Control

Yesterday, I was working in Visio, trying to line up boxes and re-size them. I was finding it very difficult to move things only a few pixels at a time, so kept over-shooting where I wanted to go, or not moving things far enough.

I use a trackball mouse, which I love (prevents problems with my wrists, and when I was working, kept other people off my computer). In general, I feel like it gives me more control than a regular mouse, but still was having problems. My solution was, when possible, to highlight the object and move it around using the arrow keys, which move in small increments so alignment is much easier. It was not an ideal solution, because required moving back and forth from the keyboard to the mouse, but at least it lined things up where I needed them.

While I was struggling with this, I started thinking about other ways of interacting with the monitor. Over the weekend I had been reading one of the chapters in About Face 2.0 - The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann that talked about manipulation devices and motor control. The book talks about several different types of
devices, including light pens, touchpads, trackballs, and of course, mice. In the book, they discuss how pens aren't practical when using vertical displays, since our motor skills don't allow us to have much fine motor control when also holding our arms vertical. Pens work well on horizontal surfaces (paper laying on a desk), but not on vertical computer screens. Which had me wondering why computer screens are vertical at all. We develop all sorts of problems from sitting at computers improperly - back problems, eye strain, carpal tunnel syndrome. None of these existed when we worked with pen and paper on a desk. Why don't we change the way computers are designed, so they mimic these? Why not have the monitor flat on the desk? Technology now enables touch screens, so why have to have a keyboard at all? Why not let me just point to what I need directly, instead of with the intermediary of a mouse, and write directly on the screen, instead of having to use a keyboard? Spending a short time teaching the software to recognize a user's handwriting would certainly be faster than teaching the user to type as quickly as they write. It would solve the physical problems a lot of people have developed from sitting at a computer all day, and would probably make parts of interaction design much easier because users would have much more fine motor control than they do with a mouse.