How faithfully should the electronic office simulate real one?

ABSTRACT

The naïve answer to this question --- "as closely as possible" --- is wrong for several reasons. First, it fails to recognize that user dexterity in manipulating simulated objects on a computer screen is not as high as it is in the physical world. Second, it wrongly subordinates users' goals to the actions that they perform in the physical office to achieve those goals. Third, it often results in unnecessary development effort and poor system performance. Fourth, it limits the functionality of the system to that provided by its physical counterpart. Finally, it presents a user interface that, though familiar, may not be optimal. There is no simple rule for determining the correct level of detail that a Desktop Metaphor system should have. Such a determination requires either a careful analysis of the desired functionality (taking into account pragmatic considerations such as the difficulty of implementation) or considerable experience in designing such systems. Many developers lack such experience and are unwilling to do the necessary analysis, and thus wind up applying the naïve approach. Some heuristics are presented to help guide designers away from the naïve approach.

REFERENCES

• 1: S. A. Bly , J. K. Rosenberg, A comparison of tiled and overlapping windows, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.101-106, April 13-17, 1986, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• 2: Frank Halasz , Thomas P. Moran, Analogy considered harmful, Proceedings of the 1982 conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.383-386, March 15-17, 1982, Gaithersburg, Maryland, United States [doi>10.1145/800049.801816]
• 3: Jeff Johnson, Calculator functions on bitmapped computers, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, v.17 n.1, p.23-28, July 1 1985 [doi>10.1145/378965.378971]
• 4: James H. Morris , Mahadev Satyanarayanan , Michael H. Conner , John H. Howard , David S. Rosenthal , F. Donelson Smith, Andrew: a distributed personal computing environment, Communications of the ACM, v.29 n.3, p.184-201, March 1986 [doi>10.1145/5666.5671]
• 5: Smith, D. C. Irby, C., Kimball, R., Verplank, W., and Harslem, E., Designing the Star User Interface. <i>Byte</i>, 1982, Pages 242--282.
• 6: Teitelman, W., The Cedar Programming Environment: A Midterm Report and Examination. <i>Technical Report CSL-83-11</i>, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.1 Applications and Expert Systems
          Subjects: Office automation

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors, Management