Tim Rowledge wrote:
Basically, three buttons is a good number for mouse buttons since you can hold the mouse with littlefinger and thumb and use three fingers for buttons. Assuming of course that the mouse if physically well designed and believe me most of them are not. Scrollwheels? Yuck. If you have three buttons, use them sensibly.
So, that's the outline of why three buttons are good and why the menu should be on the middle button.
Tim, you're the man!
The first "real" mice I've worked with were ugly as hell (looked like a half-sphere with buttons attached to the front) but passed the main usability tests: - they had 3 buttons - could be held with rounded fingers (your hand grips around the mouse instead of resting flat on it) That was so much easier on the hand than anything else which I met afterwards. Another idiocy which I'll never understand is mouse acceleration. It breaks muscle memory, a main factor of mouse usability. And don't get me started about optical mice! Not the good ones I saw at Xerox SIS which would work perfectly well on any structured surface, but the crap that became commercially available later... Even relatively new (2 yrs) logitech mice have such a jumpy positioning behavior that it's almost impossible to accurately select small-font text. Give me a good rubber-coated steel ball any time.
Cheers, Hans-Martin