This is completely subjective, but I'd prefer to design interactions around what I know my users are already comfortable with. My goal is to enable my users to get to their end goal with the least amount of friction as possible.
Why would I train a user to learn something new when the method in the OP achieves the exact same result, without a learning curve?
All I can see improving with the click, hold, and release method is enhanced "cool factor".
>This is completely subjective, but I'd prefer to design interactions around what I know my users are already comfortable with. My goal is to enable my users to get to their end goal with the least amount of friction as possible.
Well, there's a compromise, though, between:
(a) "designing interactions around what I know my users are already comfortable with"
(b) "enabling users to get to their end goal with the least amount of friction as possible"
in all cases where an initial unfamiliarity with a new idiom lowers the friction for hundreds of subsequent uses.
As a crude example, consider "undo" in a painting application. Say the user wants to erase all he did up to this point. We could let the artists work the way they are "already familiar with" (paint on top to cover their mistakes, or use some eraser tool to delete the whole thing part by part).
But by having them learn the concept of "undo", they could achieve the same effect faster. And even better if the learned the concept of "history" (jumping to arbitrary undo states).
(Now in those cases, all the above options can also be present at all times -- so the users don't have to give up one for another. But there are other cases where this is not the case, and you have to decide upon the better but new way to design a control vs the old, clunkier, but familiar).
Thought experiments aren't as reliable as controlled experiments for objectively measuring the speed and efficacy of user interfaces, and interviewing actual users for discovering subjective preferences.
We performed a controlled experiment in 1988 that compared eight item pie menus to linear menus, which showed that pie menus were significantly faster and had lower error rates than linear menus.
Users didn't have a problem with them in 1988, and probably won't now: "The most mouse naive users, while finding linear menus easier, tended to be better at pie menus and commented that with practice, they would probably be superior and in fact prefer the pie menus because of their speed and minimization of hand movement with the mouse. Not surprisingly, therefore, most of those preferring linear menus did not have a strong preference on the scaled subjective questionnaire."
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus
Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser () and Ben Shneiderman.
Computer Science Department University of Maryland College Park, Maryland 20742
Why would I train a user to learn something new when the method in the OP achieves the exact same result, without a learning curve?
All I can see improving with the click, hold, and release method is enhanced "cool factor".