Though Douglas Engelbart is usually credited with inventing the computer mouse similar pointing devices had been developed before him. But point and click devices only really gained widespread use when computers became "personal" and graphical user interfaces became the norm. And strange as it may seem today, researchers weren't sure that users could readily learn to use these new devices. A 2001 study examined children's use of drag-and-drop and of point-and-click in order:
to determine whether the choice of interaction style impacts children’s performance in interactive learning environments. The interaction styles were experimentally compared to determine if either method was superior to the other in terms of speed, error rate, or user preference, for children.Considering that today point-and-click is the primary method of mouse usage I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that:
The results were similar to previous results reported for adults: the point-and-click interaction style was faster; fewer errors were committed using it; and it was preferred over the drag-and-drop interaction style.But I doubt the ascendance of point-and-click came about from any particular research. By the time the study was published the public had probably already "voted".
Future studies will delineate the specific conditions in which mouse-over is superior to the point-and-click technique and determine whether these results generalize to web-based environments. These findings will eventually be used to generate concrete interface design guidelines that will help guide designers when to use the mouse-over and point-and-click techniques.Instead, however, I think that it was about that time that researchers reached the conclusion that people were capable of learning to operate whatever tools they became accustomed to and went on to find other fascinating topics to examine.