One button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at least 3 buttons to be useful. You sometimes need to select something and sometimes you need to launch it. Or you need to select in several different ways. Because of this miss-invention they had to invent the double-click and all the complexity of timing (try making double click for someone old an nearing senile and someone young and fast with the same timeouts - this is often impossible)
I don't know what the ideal number of mouse buttons, but agree that it is more than one. The odd thing is it's appearance in the Macintosh: a computer where the user was supposed to orient most of their actions around the mouse.
That said, I'm pretty sure the double click came about because certain operations were costly. There is no particular reason why would couldn't use a single click to launch and application or load a document, except an accidental click would force the user to wait for the process to complete (and it could take an unreasonably long period of time on older systems). Assigning that function to a secondary button would potentially make the problem worse since the user would have to keep the functions straight while learning the system, while accidentally clicking the wrong button would be more frequent than accidentally clicking a button.
I used a (OS 7/8/9) Mac for years with a one button mouse. I was very productive with it! I remember seeing Windows 95 with its right-click context menus but I wasn’t very interested at the time. I was happy using keyboard shortcuts and the like.
I believe Steve Jobs was pretty adamant about keeping the one button mouse on the Mac for years and it was absolutely the right call. The Mac was way easier to use back then!
I am not doubting you were productive with it. However that does not make it better, it just makes it what you know. User experience experts have studied this for a long time, and they all conclude that you need more than one button. (there isn't agreement on the best number as there are some trade offs, but one is clearly not enough)
The world has a real problem with people arguing what they know is best without any basis in reality. Even if there is a clear reason one choice is better, most arguments for the better choice end up being because they know it better not the clear reasons it is better (see most metric/imperial arguments)
I have some older relatives who were actually able to use a computer back then, thanks to the simplicity and brilliant design of Classic Mac OS. Now they are essentially shut out of computing for the rest of their lives. They can just barely use their cell phones to make calls and send the odd text. They do all their banking over the phone.
There are tons of people like this. Apple used to be the absolute market leader at making computing accessible for everyone. At some point they got big enough and powerful enough that they could ignore all that and just let their dev teams do whatever they want. They gave up on trying to make real computing accessible to the masses and just pushed all these users to the iPad.
While Apple's ability to create "simple and brilliant" designs in the past can be attributed to the motivation and talent of their staff, I don't think you can say their current failure to do so implies the opposite. We live in a very different world. Computers are expected to do more and, regardless of how much Apple despises it, computers are expected to interact with other systems.
Just think of Hypercard. Many people here will talk about how great it was, and it was great. Yet the most talented developers and designers in the world couldn't recreate it in a form that is both simple and reflects the needs of the modern world. It would always end up lacking essential features or be burdened by an overabundance of functionality.
What about having 2 buttons vs 1 button makes something "inaccessible"? If anything having 2 buttons makes the options that are in the context of the current application more accessible.
But people are incurious, stupid, and just dull-witted, I guess? So you really want the rest of us to have to suffer with 1 button because the lower end of the bell-curve can't handle 2 buttons for reasons related to stupidity?
People who don't come to use a computer for the first time until middle age or later tend to struggle mightily. I'm not sure why, but they seem to have a strong aversion to experimenting with the system. I face this issue almost every day with my 74-year-old father and his iPhone. He can only do the tasks which I explicitly teach him and anything new (like changing a setting he's never changed before) requires me to show him the steps. The fact that changing a different setting in the Settings app is an almost-identical process never occurs to him. He just asks for help every time.
Back in the Classic Mac OS days he did just fine with a 1-button mouse. He was able to click on and interact with everything and got what he needed out of the computer. A 2-button mouse is just utterly baffling to him. It turns every single thing on the screen into a fork in the road: do I left-click this or right-click it?
My 72 year old mother installs her own video cards and has a mouse with 5 buttons. YMMV, I guess.
The 1 button mouse was not superior in any way, and the people that get confused by a mouse with more than 1 button probably should never look at a web page with more than one thing to click. Did your father ever drive a car? Is he aware there's more than one pedal and lever to use? Did he ever find his way to the windshield wipers or did you just drive around with the rain obstructing the view? I'm genuinely curious how such a person could function in this world in the last 80 years.
The pedals in a car always do the same thing every time you press them, in every car you get into. Mouse buttons are not like this. Different applications use them differently. There may be a sizeable chunk that are reasonably consistent but there are tons of outliers that do all kinds of bizarre stuff like using right click to select or to cancel an operation or to bring up a tool tip. Sometimes it’s left click to select and right click to move.
Plus you never know what’s going to be in a context menu until you right click to open it. Sometimes you move the mouse slightly and right click something else and get a different context menu. For an older person with declining vision this can be very confusing. Fixed menus at the top of the screen are discoverable. You can even search for what you want in the help menu. Context menus are not discoverable.
I’m glad your mother knows how to install video cards. My aunt worked at a TV factory installing boards into the case and soldering all the through-hole components to the board. She’s still pretty baffled by computers but she’s almost 80 years old and rarely needs them.
You have to be willfully ignorant or brain damaged to not understand how a 2-button mouse works after the first time using it. The context menu does different things depending on the context. Someone that can't understand that is seriously in trouble in life. It's not something that should be confusing at all.
And as I said, hopefully your father never visits any websites, because they are all different with information in different places on every website. The world must be an extremely frustrating and hostile place for someone that gets confused by a 2 button mouse. I honestly feel bad for your father if everything you say is true.
I don't think it was about him saying 'one button is optimal for all time always' I think a lot of it was 'this is a whole new paradigm for people who only know the typewriter, let's make it simple for them, down the road when people have adjusted to the simple case, we can make it more elaborate'
Hell at the time when this happened most computer joysticks had only one button, or in the case of one of the popular joysticks at the time, three buttons that were all just wired to one input.
"... keyboard shortcuts ..." is a common response to defend Mac design choices.
The single shared menu is also something that made sense on the original 9" 512x384 Mac screen to save but it really is nonsensical in the days of 32" 6k displays, so much mousing to get up to that menu but of course "... keyboard shortcuts ..." comes the refrain.
The single shared menu bar has one huge advantage over per-window menu bars: infinite mouse target size along the vertical axis. When moving the mouse to a narrow strip menu bar at the top of a window you need to accelerate the mouse towards the target and then decelerate in time to stop on the target without overshoot. With a menu bar at the top of the screen you can skip the decelerate part and just slam the mouse to the top of the screen without worrying about overshoot.
You’re right about giant displays though. The best menu system for those is pie menus [1]. Although I would still dispute the advantages of the second mouse button for activating those. The F1-F12 function keys would be much better since you could have instant access to 12 different pie menus instead of a single one with right click.
To be fair, people also had to be taught how to point with a mouse.
The double-click also wasn't essential, you could perform all actions using the one-click menus. The double-click was introduced as a shortcut. From the Apple Lisa Owner's Guide:
The File/Print menu contains all of the commands you need for creating, opening, closing, and storing your documents. Because you use these commands so frequently, the Office System includes a simple shortcut for performing these tasks: clicking the mouse button twice.
To tear off a sheet of stationery, click twice rapidly on the stationery
pad icon.
To open an icon into a window, click twice rapidly on the icon.
To close an open window, click twice rapidly on the window's title bar icon.
Clicking twice to close a window can either set aside the object or save and put away the object, depending on where the object's shadows are. If there is a shadow on the desktop, clicking twice causes the object to be set aside. If the only shadow is in a folder or on a disk, clicking twice summons a dialog box, which asks you whether you want the object set aside or put away.
Pointing with the mouse is discoverable though. If you start moving it - which odds are you will do sometime (even by accident) you will see the pointer moving and eventually figure it out.
You are very unlikely to discover the double click by accident.
I think it’s a spectrum. Unless the double-click delay is ultra short, I’m pretty sure you would discover it sooner or later. My point was that you couldn’t expect someone to learn how to use a computer without any training or instructions, so if you need that anyway, you can also include less discoverable features in it.
There is a trade-off between feature sets that are useful if you know them and super discoverable feature sets, in the sense that the reason some feature is more efficient can also make it less discoverable.
The original Macintosh came with interactive tutorial software demonstrating the use of the mouse and giving you practice manipulating it. The double-click was part of this instruction.
Less familiar users are often also confused whether something requires double-click or not, double-clicking web links for example. What's worse is that is often not immediately noticeable, leading to opening same program multiple times or breaking some submission form.
The Alto used a three-button mouse. It was Charles Irby and Dave Smith who decided it would be two for the Star. It was a bitter debate, but they won.
When it was three, every Alto program had its own set of conventions for them. There was no way that could have been unified for a multi-purpose computer.
All lab GUIs starting from Engelbart’s AUGMENT had 3-button mouses, including the Xerox Alto. The researchers and engineers using the Alto found that the mouse buttons were confusing, even this small group couldn’t remember the combinations in each application, and it lead to many inconsistencies between apps. Each button had a very precise function, and they were as much modal shortcuts than direct manipulation buttons.
Even Xerox tried to reduce it to one button for the Star (their first commercial GUI computer), but from their own published account they couldn’t find a way and the Star shipped with a 2-button mouse.
Remember, at the time most people targeted by Apple (or other computer manufacturers) had never used a computer, and the people who did use a computer never used a mouse! (Except for the PARC researchers and some other researchers, so maybe 2000 people worldwide)
It’s people coming from Xerox to Apple who were the most interested in having a one button mouse! They knew the 3-button mouse would confuse users and was entirely unnecessary for most users (as it is today, the secondary click being reduced to just a convenient shortcut, nothing more)
> One button mouse was one of the worst inventions. Mice need at least 3 buttons to be useful.
I think the way the article lays out the invention shows that it was a good idea at the time. Apple sticking to a single button mouse was a bad idea. But it wasn't like Tesler saw three buttons and said "If I remove two, I'm a genius".
I don't know what you do with your third button, but I have never used it. It's not a core interaction in any interface I've seen. On my windows machine it does all sorts of unexpected things from starting a scroll mode, dragging items (very rarely) to closing tabs, to nothing on most things. It's not useful. Now the back and forth buttons are super handy, but I wouldn't say they are essential to a mouse.
As other commenters have noted, it was from actual user testing, and from the experience of the Xerox alumni. Definitely the right call in 1983.
Today of course Apple uses trackpads with "zero" buttons (though the trackpad is clickable in various ways) and a lot of non-obvious (though generally well-designed) gestures like two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom/rotate, etc.
