SUPPORTING COMMAND REUSE: EMPIRICAL FOUNDATIONS AND PRINCIPLES
Date
1989-12-01
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Abstract
Current user interfaces fail to support some work habits that people
naturally adopt when interacting with general-purpose computer
environments. In particular, users frequently and persistently
repeat their activities (eg command lines, menu selections), but
computers do little to help them to review and re-execute earlier
ones--at most providing ad hoc "history mechanisms" founded
on the premise that the last few inputs form a reasonable selection
of candidates for re-use.
This paper provides theoretical and empirical foundations for the
design of a general facility that helps people to recall, modify
and re-submit their previous activities to computers. It abstracts
several striking characteristics of repetition behaviour from usage
data gleaned from many users of different systems. It presents a
general model of interaction called recurrent systems. Particular
attention is paid to the repetition of command lines given a sequential
"history list" of previous ones, and this distribution can be
conditioned in several ways to enhance predictive power. Reformulated as
empirically-based general principles, the model provides design guidelines
for reuse facilities specifically and modern user interfaces generally.
A brief case study of actual use of a widely-available history system
is included.
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Computer Science