Engelbart's Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs Ease-of-Use

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

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#6	Fibido commented on 10 Apr 2008 I use the the Bluetooth Frogpad to do much the same as his keyboard. It uses chords too. I had to work on it for about 7 weeks before I was typing 30wpm. Now after a year, I can switch hands (I have a left and right frogpad) and use the mouse at the same time typing about 45 wpm. For reference, I type about 60 wpm on a full keyboard. I see a huge difference in normal day to day tasks. If I could split the mouse and keyboard across separate apps it would only get better.
#5	Eric Rickard commented on 10 Apr 2008 It's great to see Doug's back in the news. There are few computer pioneers who remain relevant beyond their natural career span. Thanks for the article. I know that it's been a frustration of love for Doug to see so many of his ideas reamin in the archives. I encourage all new computer scientists and engineers to review Doug's early papers. It's a gold mine of ideas!
#4	Dorai Thodla commented on 9 Apr 2008 Doug once mentioned that he trained his daughters when they were young and it did not take them long to learn it. I think the Accordion keyboard did not get enough exposure for us to test out the theory whether it is more difficult to learn. Valerie Landau did a study with her students in CSUMB with some interesting results and has built several prototypes since then. Have you seen teenagers texting? They use one hand, and type faster than we can on a qwerty keyboard. The opencourse.org has some material on some of the CSUMB studies.
#3	Gardner Campbell commented on 8 Apr 2008 Engelbart believed everyone should be striving toward just the capability and collective intelligence he outlined in his “Augmenting Human Intellect,” and he also believed that if we didn’t, we were surely doomed as a civilization.
#2	davidw commented on 8 Apr 2008 Engelbart was concerned with tools for group collaboration, process hierarchies, and multi-level nesting of organizational knowledge. Take a look a his “mother of all demos” demo, which is indeed truly amazing. Here's the link: http://youtube.com/results?search_query=mother+of+all+demos&search_type=
#1	cgerrish commented on 8 Apr 2008 I like Doug Engelbart as much as the next guy, but you’d think we could move beyond 1968, the icon, the mouse and the window.