Browsing by Author "Thimbleby, Harold"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    CLIPBOARD/UNDO PROBLEMS AVOIDED BY NAMED GROUPS AND THEIR GENERALIZATION
    (1991-06-01) Thimbleby, Harold
    Being able to undo any operation improves user interfaces, for various reasons. It gives the user a greater sense of safety and encourages active exploration of a system. Undo enables users to extract themselves from error states that might otherwise have trapped them. However, undo is only useful if both: the user knows they have made a mistake, and that the mistake can in fact be undone. Clearly, a poorly implemented undo may compromise the user. This brief paper gives an example taken from the Macintosh user interface where a 'correctly' implemented undo-last-action (the standard Macintosh undo) fails the first condition given above because of the clipboard. We infer lessons about the observability of user actions from this example, and look forward to a safer, more generalised interface that takes the concept of generic actions (like undo, cut, copy, paste) further. This paper discusses the Macintosh user interface (Apple, 87); a discussion of its strive for consistency can be found in Tognazzini (89).
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    USER MODELING AS MACHINE IDENTIFICATION: NEW DESIGN METHODS FOR HCI
    (1991-06-01) Thimbleby, Harold; Witten, Ian H.
    No Abstract
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    THE WEAK SCIENCE OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
    (1991-12-01) Greenberg, Saul; Thimbleby, Harold
    This article is about science and the discipline of human-computer interaction (HCI). Science in HCI is merely one component of a wider agenda; alone science is not sufficient for 'good' HCI (whatever that is). We argue that science is necessary, but the way that science is undertaken--or purported to be undertaken--in HCI is inadequate. Failures are due to the sparsity of theories and risky hypotheses, the pragmatic difficulty of substantiating experiments through replication, and the over-generalization of experimental results.
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    THE WORM THAT TURNED: A SOCIAL USE OF COMPUTER VIRUSES
    (1989-07-01) Witten, Ian; Thimbleby, Harold
    No Abstract