I just saw an ad in my inbox which describes how your mouse is slowing you down, and you need to switch to using a text editor/IDE which can be completely driven by the keyboard.

And it bugged me.

It bugs me the same way all the other Shiny New Things bugs me, the way they bug Uncle Bob.

Further, it bugs me because we have some concrete evidence that this simply is not true. Meaning we have concrete evidence that (a) selecting a menu item is faster than typing a command, (b) finding a menu item is faster than using a keyboard shortcut if you haven’t committed that keyboard shortcut to muscle memory, (c) it takes a nontrivial amount of time and effort to learn the keyboard shortcut, which means that while common commands will be committed to muscle memory quickly (i.e., cut, copy and paste), less common commands are faster found on a properly structured hierarchical menu.

But no-one gives a fuck about evidence-based data anymore.

Because it gets in the way of The Churn.™

And it gets in the way of a thousand developers trying to make a name for themselves by positioning themselves as the inventor of The Next New Shiny Thing.

So do us a favor: if you design user interfaces or are thinking of The Next New Shiny Thing, get Designing With The Mind In Mind and understand how and why our brains work the way they do.

And stop treating your users like “lusers” or like Stockholm syndrom sufferers, so badly tortured by your poor design that they engage in traumatic bonding through an “ongoing cycle of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change.”