I was a little groggy when I waited in line for breakfast at the Orange County Airport’s McDonald’s. I noticed the cash registers at Mickey D’s have become far more sophisticated than they used to be; indeed, they are more or less commodity PCs. The only thing different is there is no mouse.

I began thinking about how a cashier would fare having to line up and push a mouse around the screen every time she entered orders. It would take twice as long to take an order, at least! Computer mice aren’t as easy to use from a standing position as they are from a seated one (in my opinion, anyway).

This brings me further into my longstanding issues with a lot of computer interfaces. For all the marketing that went into them, the mouse-and-menu model is spectacularly clumsy. There is little intuitive in steering a mouse around to get what you want. A substantial amount of movement and thought must go into translating those hand movements into a place on the screen.

That’s when I realized how efficient touch screens are. Tablet PCs and PDAs use touch screens. Most use them to an advantage, though not all. My Sharp Zaurus has a brain-dead, menu-driven interface which likely played a role in killing it as a product. Good touch screen interfaces eliminate the translation step of hand movements-equate-to-pointer. The user might not be consciously aware of this mouse-work, but it nevertheless is there, potentially adding stress to her work.

There is little thought wasted in poking a button on a screen to make something happen. Over eons humans have learned that poking something is a good way to provoke a reaction. Interfaces designed to take advantage of this let users get right to the point (no pun intended). Such users spend their time doing their work rather than fighting a mouse.

To summarize: The computer mouse beats typing, but still isn’t as easy as a touch-screen. Interfaces overflowing with menus are bad. Let out the caveman in your users by making your interface caveman easy.