From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Jul 14 00:24:13 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id AAA25175 for chat-outgoing; Sun, 14 Jul 1996 00:24:13 -0700 (PDT) Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id AAA25086 for ; Sun, 14 Jul 1996 00:24:01 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sax.sax.de by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id JAA22246; Sun, 14 Jul 1996 09:23:58 +0200 Received: (from uucp@localhost) by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id JAA20393; Sun, 14 Jul 1996 09:23:57 +0200 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.7.5/8.6.9) id JAA15291; Sun, 14 Jul 1996 09:13:34 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199607140713.JAA15291@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: FreeBSD keyboard To: jfieber@indiana.edu (John Fieber) Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 09:13:34 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: from John Fieber at "Jul 13, 96 03:39:25 pm" X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL17 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk As John Fieber wrote: > It has nothing to do with typing ability. It has everything to > do with the basic fact that humans are far better at > recognition than recall. Recall may be more efficient, but only > comes after a great time investment in memorization. For > infrequent users, or infrequent tasks, recall will never be as > efficient as recognition. The problem arises, however, that even for frequent users of such a recognition-based system, the efficiency cannot grow beyond a certain point. When looking at the icon and toolbar etc. forest of the typical application of these days, i still believe it's rather done for optics than to improve recognition. I usually get the impression that even the infrequent winloose user has about the same idea about the particular meaning of these 25 icons in the toolbar as me, who does not know anything about these programs at all. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)