The mouse is dead

One of my students had picked up his mouse and was moving it slowly across the screen. The mouse pointer wasn't following his movements and he was frustrated.

technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

The mouse is dead

Feb. 10, 2010

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2010, Al Fasoldt
Originally posted as a blog item

   I will never forget arriving at a class I was teaching on new software, back in the days when the newspaper was shifting from DOS-based systems to Windows PCs, and discovering some of the students transfixed by the new peripheral at each computer -- a mouse. These were not computer users who were in class to learn new software; they were newspaper editors in class to learn how to be computer users. That singular difference was more important that any other characteristic.
   One of my students had picked up his mouse and was moving it slowly across the screen. The mouse pointer wasn't following his movements and he was frustrated.
   This image stayed in my mind because my fellow editor had pointed out something I might never have realized. The interface was flawed. Moving a mouse on the table in order to move a pointer on the screen might seem brilliantly intuitive to some of us, but it was not at all obvious to this man. Nor should it have been. The ideal interface would have been a mouse on a screen -- just as he had attempted to achieve. Ideally, in fact, there would have been no mouse at all. You would simply point to an object on the screen and touch it to do something with it. You could touch it and drag it, or touch it and turn it around, or touch it with two fingers and draw them apart to make the object larger or touch it with two fingers and bring them together to make the object smaller.
   If you're an iPhone user, you know the rest of the story. Touching is the best interface of all. The iPad's interface is the same. The mouse is ancient. It's dead. You might not know it yet, but the mouse is outahere.
   Goodbye, mouse.
   Sometimes change comes gradually. Sometimes it comes in a rush. But it always comes.