For several years, I had been quite happy with my Logitech mouse. I loved the scroll wheel. And it was damn comfortable. Then, sadly, it started to lose its mojo: it became erratic, and I knew it was just a matter of time before I’d have to consign it to the gadget graveyard.

I’m lucky — I sit behind Fabrizio, who always has a healthy collection of gadgets that he’s happy to share. I had three mice that I was test driving:

I took my sweet time, and after a couple weeks I settled on Apple’s Magic Mouse. I just loved the easy of being able to scroll up and down and left and right with a single finger. If you haven’t seen it before, watch Apple’s video of this thing in action.

You gotta hand it to them, Apple may have been the last company in the world to put the obviously-essential right-click on their mice, but having a trackpad on your mouse is surely the biggest thing to happen to mice since, well, the left-click.

The technology is revolutionary, but the experience is just evolutionary

Here are the things Apple lets you do with their touchpad mouse:

• scroll left and right, and anything in between (sweet!)
• scroll up and down (nothing new), but with “momentum” scrolling (pretty sweet)
• use two fingers to paginate forward and back, which is basically useful when you’re reading PDFs (meh)

And that’s it! Doesn’t really seem that revolutionary, does it?

Worse, there’s no ability to activate Exposé (which lets you view all open windows) from your mouse. Exposé is such a vital piece to most Mac users’ work flow that the absence of this feature is truly perplexing. As my colleague Ruairi, who uses one of the older Mac mice, said, ”It seems like it’s paying good money to take a small step backwards.”

Enter MagicPrefs

Then on Twitter, someone mentioned MagicPrefs. This entirely free application draws back the curtain on a world of possibilities available with this mouse. Wow! Now I’m seeing the magic.

A range of gestures — swipes, clicks, taps, drags, pinches, all available in two-finger, three-finger, and four-finger versions — quickly add up to three screens worth of choices:

Never mind triggering Exposé, what can’t I do with this mouse now?

The MagicPrefs experience curve

Very quickly, the reality of actually using this complexity hits home. Here’s what the experience was like for me:

The dotted lines on the graph show my starting happiness level (pre-Magic Mouse) and my finishing level. Notice how long it took me to get back above my starting point.

Designing for tech enthusiasts (e.g. nerds) versus normal people

“But,” I can hear you saying, “that much choice is a bad thing. Haven’t you read ‘The Paradox of Choice’?”

Absolutely.

To be honest, I imagine that only the folks who assemble their own computers from scrapyards of components like this much choice.

And it’s actually worse than it looks, because with each tweak of your preferences you have to not only remember the gestures you enabled, but also retrain your fingers to use it correctly.

You see, the fundamental problem with MagicPrefs can be summed up in one phrase: accidental gestures. See the trough of that experience curve I drew for you — you click on your mouse to, say, open up a link in your browser and suddenly the screen jumps to Expose. Grrrr.

The reason for this is that we rest our fingers on the mouse when we use it, and it’s these resting fingers that screw up the whole thing. You’re think you’re single clicking but you’re actually two-finger or three-finger clicking.

With every setting you enable, you probably double or triple the number of these accidental gestures you’re going to trigger.

And the developer of MagicPrefs knew this. He even warns you to “take it easy with the gestures…take your time to get comfortable with each new gesture you choose”.

And of course, the folks at Apple knew this too.

Now this is design restraint

Apple creates a truly innovative technology — a mouse with a trackpad that can support a bunch of different gestures and actions, and releases that product to the market, but limits the functionality of that mouse to probably 5% of what it can do. That is design restraint.

My guess is that the thinking at Apple went something like this:

“It’s just too damn hard to use most of the gestures on this mouse. Until we figure out a way to get people to hold a mouse differently, we’re gonna have to disable all this potential functionality. We won’t aim for the moon on this one. Instead we’ll go for an experience curve with a much more restrained high, but a dramatically reduced low as well. We can’t risk people pronouncing the product a lemon because they’re haven’t made it past the low point of the experience curve.”

Design restraint is a hallmark of quality design

On the last couple of projects I’ve worked on, I’ve begun to appreciate the importance of design restraint. Often you can’t add features because developers are telling you it takes too much time to implement. But what if you don’t have developers holding you in check? What if everyone is pushing you to add more? Saying no is as important a skill for a designer as it is for a developer.

And that’s why I admire Apple so much here. I think there are few companies out there who understand the experience cost of adding features, and who so clearly prioritise the experience over the feature list.

Still though, I think Apple took it too far

That said, I think Apple took their restraint a step too far. I agree with the default settings they’ve set for the mouse, which almost certainly prevent any accidental gestures. But they should have given us a couple more options. They shouldn’t tell me, “You can’t handle it.” Save me the pain of choosing from the confusing array of options that MagicPrefs gives me. Just give me one or two more options, the ones that you think are worth considering. And let one of them trigger Expose!