thoughtcrumbs

My kingdom for a mouse

At some point this weekend my mouse stopped working, probably due to a Windows Update. I began with by troubleshooting the hardware: moved the wireless receiver around, changed the batteries, plugged it into both PS/2 and USB ports, all to no avail. Next stop: reinstalling the mouse drivers. Now, have you ever spent much time surfing the web using only the keyboard? Luckily, I already knew a host of keyboard shortcuts (F6, Alt-Tab, Page Up/Down, Esc, Alt-F, etc.), and was able to successfully navigate to Logitech's site and download the latest drivers.

Winners and losers in this odyssey:

• Google (loser): Forced me to tab four times through their logo and through all of the sponsored links before I could land on the best (first) search result.
• Logitech (winner): Four tabs and I was on their download page. A few more tabs and I was on the mice page, then my mouse page, where I was able to get the driver in a few seconds. All the while I could tell exactly which link/image was currently selected. And I could predict what would be selected next.

It's not the number of keystrokes that's a problem; I could brainlessly tab through a ten-item menu with ease. What matters is that people know what's selected at all times. When the faint dotted selector box moved from the second sponsored link on Google (just above my search results) to the third sponsored link (to the right of the results), I had no idea where I was. Why hadn't it continued down the column, as it was doing? I tabbed and shift-tabbed several times hoping to find the selector by movement. Eventually, the URLs for the selected item in the bottom of my browser window clued me in. Yay for Netscape, but boo for Google.