How you tell your computer what you mean: Ostension in interactive systems

Authors:
James A. Galambos;Eloise S. Wikler;John B. Black;Marc M. Sebrechts
Affiliations:
Yale University;Yale University;Yale University;Wesleyan University
Venue:
CHI '83 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Year:
1983

Citing 2
Cited 1

The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction

The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction
Analogy considered harmful

CHI '82 Proceedings of the 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

The cognitive model: an approach to designing the human-computer interface

ACM SIGCHI Bulletin

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Abstract

An important part of communication is being able to point to an object without referring to its components or to the area surrounding it. How to do this is the problem of ostension. We observed many ostension errors in novices learning to use a full-screen text editor. Specifically, the novices erroneously tried to use keys that are appropriate for pointing when using a typewriter but incorrect in screen editors (e.g., space bar, backspace key, etc.), they frequently missed the location they intended by one character, they inadvertently pointed to the wrong occurrcnce of a string using a FIND command, they incorrectly specified boundaries by forgetting about “invisible” characters (e.g., formatting characters), and they mistakenly attempted to point to non-typing areas of the screen that were off-limits.