摘要:

This article is an interview study of calendar use and a cognitive analysis of the interactions between the design of calendars and the task of prospective remembering. The study and analysis are coordinated to present a general critique of current electronic calendar designs and to note opportunities for future designs. The interview data reveal continued use of paper calendars in a highly computerized setting. A key conclusion is that paper calendars support prospective remembering by promoting browsing of existing appointments during subsequent calendar keeping but that this advantage is compromised in current electronic designs. Other aspects of the interviews and the analyses address the representational limitations of both paper and electronic calendars. This research explores a methodology in which design implications of qualitative empirical data are understood and systematized through theoretical analyses of existing artifacts.

ISSN:0737-0024    

DOI:10.1207/s15327051hci0802_1

出版商:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.    

年代:1993

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

Over the past 8 years, The TextLab Research Group within the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina has developed a collection of tools and techniques for recording users' interactions with graphics-based direct manipulation computer systems in machine-readable form and for automatically analyzing and displaying those data. This article describes these tools, discusses their methodological context, and considers their implications for software design and studies of human-computer interaction. Tools discussed include the following: tracking users' behaviors and producing a machine-recorded protocol at the level of users' actions, replaying users' sessions from the protocol data, modeling users' strategies using formal cognitive grammars, analyzing user sessions by parsing them with the grammars, and displaying results in visual form- both static and animated- to facilitate interpretation and understanding by researchers. These tools are placed in a methodological context by reviewing issues associated with concurrent think-aloud, keystroke, X-Windows, and video protocols; other support systems for working with these forms of protocol data are also reviewed. The discussion concludes with our reflections on the methodology and its application to computer systems and research objectives different from our own.

ISSN:0737-0024    

DOI:10.1207/s15327051hci0802_2

出版商:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.    

年代:1993

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

This article is concerned with an analysis of the requirements for text-based on-line conferencing. From a system perspective, text-based on-line conferencing can be viewed as either message passing or data sharing. These complementary views give rise to different design dimensions. For example, the message-passing view is concerned with granularity, channels, message labels, and so on. The data-sharing view is concerned with the access different individuals have to the text: read only, appending, editing, pointing, and so on. A deliberately sparse prototype was built and placed in this design space. This minimal prototype has limited functionality so that the real problems experienced by users can show through. Relevant literature from disciplines such as social psychology, conversational analysis, and linguistics is briefly reviewed in terms of three generic communication tasks: synchronizing communication, maintaining structural coherence, and maintaining referents. An empirical analysis of subjects' use of the sparse prototype was analyzed to establish the relevance of the generic communication tasks to text-based on-line conferencing. Possible forms that support for these tasks might take are discussed.

ISSN:0737-0024    

DOI:10.1207/s15327051hci0802_3

出版商:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.    

年代:1993

数据来源: Taylor

摘要:

This article addresses a key question in the application of Card, Moran, and Newell's (1983) keystroke-level model to software in which users specify a command by working through a system of hierarchical menus. For example, to insert a row in Lotus 1-2-3®, the user makes three menu choices: W for worksheet, I for insert, and R for row. In the keystroke-level model, it is assumed that a time-consuming mental operation precedes each command. The question in the application of the keystroke-level model to hierarchical menu systems is whether the keystrokes WIR in the previous example constitute the execution of three commands and thus require three mental operations or whether WIR acts as a single command and requires only one mental operation. Data were collected from four highly experienced Lotus 1-2-3 users as they went about their day-to-day work. Strong evidence that only one mental operation is involved in choosing from a hierarchical menu system was obtained. We hypothesize that the discrepancy of our results from the data of others is due to the fact that our subjects were more experienced. The implications of our findings for the design of menus is discussed.

ISSN:0737-0024    

DOI:10.1207/s15327051hci0802_4

出版商:Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.    

年代:1993

数据来源: Taylor