January 30th, 2005

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Technology
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In Defense of the Single-Button Mouse?

Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog, here’s a short essay from Gear Live in praise of Apple’s one-button mouse. The Apple Weblog summarizes the essay:

  • The majority of computer users don’t use the two-button mouse on either platform (”Giving the average person a
    right mouse button is like giving a bald man a comb.”).
  • It encourages developers to stick to the Apple standard of providing a way to access all application functions
    from a single mouse click in a menu.
  • The un-average user who will desire a two-button mouse will more often than not chuck out their two-button and go
    with some higher order of multi-button mouse, anyway. Why bother sending a two-button, then?

I had a look, but couldn’t find any usage surveys to quantify mouse button usage. The average computer users I know make at least occasional use of the right mouse button. They certainly know what I mean when I tell them to ‘right-click’. After all, doesn’t the average user occasionally copy an image from their browser window? I think they do, and that they use the context menu to do it.

We should also keep in mind that we (meaning me, and other people 35 and under) are the first generation to grow up with the mouse.
I’m sure the average 8-year-old is using five buttons, if he or she can get a hold of the appropriate mouse.

It’s pretty rare that functionality is restricted to the right mouse button–I can only think of a couple of examples. There are standards at both Microsoft and Apple for UI design, and you’ll find that they require multiple access routes to all functionality.

Most importantly, the one-button argument flies in the face of broad technological trend. Pretty much everything, and certainly every input device, from the keyboard to the remote control to the joystick, has acquired more buttons in the past two decades. Personally, I don’t know how I worked without the scroll-wheel on my mouse.

Two mouse buttons makes you more efficient. 16 may not, but there’s no question that two can make you work faster. The ‘average user’ is a moving target, and they’ve moved past the one button mouse. Apple ought to hop on board.

Comments: 10 Responses so far

Nicole Simon
January 30th, 2005
2:33 am

IIRC you take apple-mouseclick to achive what you would do with a right click.

I don’t see the need for >2 buttons and a scrollwheel with click and don’t like it; each time I had one I made the other buttons ‘silent’ to do nothing.

But what do you expect from a world where you are told to do everything by mouse instead of teaching people how to work faster via keyboard?

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Anonymous
January 30th, 2005
3:29 am

I find Apple’s refusal to join the rest of the computing world bizarre, to say the least. Part of it is my own experience — 95% of my time on computers has been spent on DOS, Windows, and various Unix machines, all of which supported, and were shipped with, two or three-button mice. When I jump on to a Mac, I find myself reaching for the right button and… it isn’t there. Keyboard-click or click-and-hold schemes are, for me, annoyances, rather than SOP as it is for dedicated Mac users. Even worse was the original iMac’s round mouse. Its shape guaranteed that you couldn’t grab the mouse and know which way was up just by the feel of the thing. Chalk it us to Jobsian aesthetics trumping functionality.

The standard line from Apple is that a 1-button mouse is easier for novice users to deal with. Very well, then. Any person of minimal intelligence should be able to figure out that a second mouse button does something distinct from the first, and therefore use the first button until they figure out what the second one does. Novice users, by definition, do not stay novices for long, progressing soon to “ordinary” users. On a machine that’s designed to be easy to learn, such as the Mac and recent Windows iterations, they accomplish this transition in fairly little time; from that point, they’ll learn to make use of that second button and join the rest of us that can’t imagine reverting to a one-button world.

I’m not sure what the practical upper limit for mouse buttons is — I’m guessing 3 buttons, plus scroll wheel and rocker. Any more than three buttons, and you have to map out what all those extra buttons do in what context. Specialized situations aside, I suspect that this is overkill.

Oddly enough, keyboards are the one computer component that has gotten worse over time. I’m stuck on 101-key keyboards. My 1989-vintage (that’s not a typo; I also have 1994 and 1995 models) IBM keyboard has a feel unmatched by fancypants multimedia keyboards with CD ejectors, volume controllers, and whatnot. Bells and whistles be damned; their rubber-dome key switches are junk. The extra functions represented by the “windows” and “menu” keys on 104-key models aren’t critical, and besides, that’s what Ctrl-Esc and Alt-space are there for. The IBM keyboard is a throwback to the days when the keyboard was the main input device, and not something to skimp on as it is now. The keyboard that my current machine shipped with weighs about 12 ounces, bends when I type, and gives no tactile feedback. That’s why it’s in deep storage, replaced by a 16-year-old component.

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Ian King
January 30th, 2005
3:31 am

Oh, bloody hell. I posted the above diatribe, but forgot to fill in the name and website fields.

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Carol
January 30th, 2005
7:47 am

Woe to the man who tries to take away my right mouse button!!! And I’d draw blood if the scrollwheel was on the chopping block…

LEAVE my MOUSE alone. Or ELSE.

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Marc Vandersluys
January 30th, 2005
8:56 am

I have two buttons and a clicking scroll-wheel and I use *all* of them regularly. In particular, Firefox users can use the scrollwheel button for tabbed browsing; design thiefs can use the right-click to view source code; right-click to copy link location for RSS feeds, copy images, etc.

I’m sure that there is a whole host of other shortcuts (combined with the keyboard, for instance) of which I am unaware.

There is no reason to lose what we have here.

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Nathan Nutter
January 30th, 2005
10:52 am

Well, most users use IE which allows them to save images using the image toolbar that pops up when you hover over an image looong enough.

I personally don’t care about the right-click or thumb buttons, I personally find they take a tiny bit of thought to use mostly because my hand does not fit the mouse.

What I could not live without is a scroll wheel, I guess if I have my way there would just be the scroll wheel, which could act us the only button too. ;-)

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'nee
January 30th, 2005
11:26 am

I never use the scroller for clicking, although it is able to be clicked. I use the scroller constantly, though, for … you know … scrolling. I use the right mouse button pretty often on Windows, for image saving or properties-selecting or explorer-opening, but I never use it on X-Windows systems. It really depends on how the OS is designed. I like having “extra” features hidden away under the right button, but on the other hand… why now make everything available right off the bat? Or “off the mouse.”

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Bob Ippolito
January 30th, 2005
1:25 pm

Typically, copying an image on a Mac consists of dragging the image to where you want it to go, so you certainly don’t need additional mouse buttons for that.

I do nearly always use desktop Macs with a multi-button mouse.. but I have no problem when using my Powerbook’s single-button track pad. Your hands are already so close to the meta-keys that they might as well be additional mouse buttons.

Though I do make a lot of use out of my scroll wheel, when I’m without one there are a lot of keys that I can efficiently use to navigate a document. pgup/pdgn goes a page at a time, home/end or cmd-up/cmd-down scroll to the top of a page, up/down scrolls in small increments, and the spacebar almost always advances a single page if you don’t have focus on some control that eats the spacebar (like a text field).

I’m not sure why it really matters, anyhow. Everyone I know that gives a damn how many buttons their mouse has doesn’t use the one that shipped with their computer, regardless of what platform it is.

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Anonymous
January 30th, 2005
2:46 pm

Keep in mind that the reason the right click is so important is because Windows makes it so important. It doesn’t have to be that way.

For people who haven’t already been trained to like them, two-button mice are much less intuitive . At a company I used to work for, one of the board members (an old guy in his 70s or so) had one of the techs disable his right mouse button, because he kept clicking it by accident.

Linux works best with three buttons (with two you have to click them both simultaneously to fake a middle click). It looks like there is a rule that the more buttons required, the less intuitive the OS. :)

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Nathan Nutter
January 31st, 2005
10:49 pm

I got my wish today:
“What I could not live without is a scroll wheel, I guess if I have my way there would just be the scroll wheel, which could act us the only button too.”

And I ordered a 15″ PowerBook!

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