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ABSTRACT

Most presently available interactive computer interfaces treat their users in an unfriendly, uncooperative, and inflexible way, resulting in feelings of frustration and a conseqeuent loss of productivity for the users. These problems have led to attempts (e.g. [6, 8, 12, 13]) to make interfaces appear more friendly and cooperative through the addition of advanced interface features such as spelling correction, on-line help, personalized defaults, etc.. While common-sense suggests such features may be helpful, there is little hard evidence about how helpful they are or whether they are worth the overheads they entail. A primary reason for this lack of information is the practical difficulty of experimentation. Many of these features are time-consuming to implement, are usually implemented without adequate instrumentation, and are implemented in different and difficult to compare ways from system to system (see [10], for example). These problems in evaluation suggest the need for a test-bed interface in which various advanced features could be tried out in a consistent and adequately instrumented way with a variety of application systems. In this paper, we present a detailed rationale and a partially implemented design for a test-bed of this kind.

REFERENCES

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• 2: TOPS LISP. Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Department, 1978.
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• 11: Robertson, G., Newell, A., and Ramakrishna, K. ZOG: A Man-Machine Communication Philosophy. Tech. Rept., Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Department, August, 1977.
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: User-centered design

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

General Terms:
Design, Performance