HOW USERS REPEAT THEIR ACTIONS ON COMPUTERS: PRINCIPLES FOR DESIGN OF HISTORY MECHANISMS
Date
1987-09-01
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Abstract
Several striking characteristics of how often people repeat their
actions on interactive systems are abstracted from usage data
gleaned from many users of different classes over a period of
months. Reformulated as empirically-based general principles, these
provide design guidelines for history mechanisms specifically
and modern user interfaces generally. Particular attention is paid
to the repetition of command lines, and to the probability distribution
of the next line given a sequential "history list" of previous ones.
Several ways are examined of conditioning this distribution to
enhance predictive power. A brief case study of actual use of a
widely-used history system is also included.
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Computer Science