Technical debates: Mouse or Keyboard

I’m fascinated by the different ways that graphic designers work. Coming to it late in the game and with no “formal” education, I haven’t been “taught” a way to work and I have developed my own workflow based on what’s comfortable to me. And because of Adobe’s fleet of software being mostly driven by a dizzying amount of pallets (oh, excuse me, they’re panels now), I find that I have to keep a hand close to my mouse–if not on my mouse–90% of the time. However, in viewing many of the responses from experienced (even expert) level users on the Adobe User-to-User forums, I’ve noticed that most of them consider keyboard shortcuts the most efficient way to work–keeping their hands on the keyboard as much as possible.

I can’t say that I understand this type of workflow. I use the keyboard for typing, but very little of my work requires me to actually type. In my general workflow, text is given to me ready to flow and the most typing I do is when making editor-requested corrections–and these are rarely straight typing, but a matter of deleting a period here and adding a comma there. I use the mouse to navigate, to select text, to select tools, to apply styles from the pallets (er, panels) and the most used menu in any of my applications is the contextual menu which is just a mouse click away no matter where your cursor is on the screen.

I’ve been a power user of Indesign since it’s first version and I still don’t know the keyboard shortcuts for the tools. Why? Because I’ve never had occasion to use them. In my opinion, such shortcuts can lead to problems because you get at them different ways depending whether you are in type or not. I’d rather avoid the complications of accidentally inserting unwanted letters in my text.

But obviously there is something to this debate because Adobe has begun building all kinds of type-driven features into InDesign. In IDCS2, they introduced the quick apply pallet that allows you to grab your styles through a series of keystrokes–a concept which I have never been able to wrap my mind around–and hence a feature that I have used a total of two times since I upgraded to CS2. After all, I have to grab my mouse to select the text I want styled, why not click on the style in the pallet while I have my hand on the mouse? Is this not efficient?

All of my collegues seem to be mostly mouse users as well, so I have actually never seen a keyboard user at full steam. It would be an interesting test to give the same project to two designers with opposing keyboard/mouse habits and see which one can produce the final result more efficiently. Of course, such a test would be handicapped by the speed of creativity unless the steps of the project were all carefully prearranged.

So then, of course, the final question is: who loses to carpal tunnel syndrome the fastest? Is keyboard use harder on your wrists than mouse use? I’m sure there’s been a study on this somewhere. I’m more comfortable with my hand on the mouse and I think I move my hands around more, allowing my muscles and tendons to relax and change positions. If your hands never leave the keyboard … doesn’t this put you at risk for serious nerve damage?

Even when it comes to typing lengthy prose–such as this post–I take frequent breaks to read what I have written and my right hand automatically goes to my mouse to scroll the text or change my location in the text. Amazingly enough, it’s so unconscious that I never even remember removing my hands from the keyboard. Oh well, I guess I’m a mouse user by habit and no amount of keyboard driven features are going to change my habits. And I don’t want to hear anything about old dogs and new tricks.