Principles of interactive computer graphics (2nd ed.)
Principles of interactive computer graphics (2nd ed.)
The natural language of interactive systems
Communications of the ACM
TENEX, a paged time sharing system for the PDP - 10
Communications of the ACM
A high-level approach to computer document formatting
POPL '80 Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Design of Man-Computer Dialogues
Design of Man-Computer Dialogues
The on-line user-computer interface: the effects of interface-flexibility, experience, and terminal-type on user-satisfactionand performance.
TEX and METAFONT: New directions in typesetting
TEX and METAFONT: New directions in typesetting
Interface design issues for advice-giving expert systems
Communications of the ACM
Autocompletion in full text transaction entry: a method for humanized input
CHI '86 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Interactive Editing Systems: Part II
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
User Recovery and Reversal in Interactive Systems
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
A comparative study of moded and modeless text editing by experienced editor users
CHI '83 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
An ease of use evaluation of an integrated document processing system
CHI '82 Proceedings of the 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Defining the ergonomic buzzwords
ACM '83 Proceedings of the 1983 annual conference on Computers : Extending the human resource
Yet another history mechanism for command interpretors
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Evaluating guidelines for writing user interface text
SIGDOC '07 Proceedings of the 25th annual ACM international conference on Design of communication
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Research in user interface design is like the weather—everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything about it. While this isn't strictly true, the great majority of guidelines for user interface design that one is likely to come across are based on the experience or gut feelings of a particular designer. These are better than nothing, but they are made less useful since 1) a particular recommendation could be based on factors unique to the designer's own system, 2) the population for whom the particular system is intended is either not described in detail or is not a generalizable sample of computer users, 3) designers' gut feelings are notoriously inaccurate sources for human factors guidelines. Thus the main body of recommendations available to the designer of a new system is more in the category of folklore than of readily accepted engineering principles. So long as one recognizes these limitations, it is still very helpful to consider the recommendations one finds in the literature when designing a new system. Some of these are based on experimental evidence, while others are repeated often enough and with so little opposition that their utility is better than average. In this paper, I will show how these principles have been applied in designing the Etude text processing system. After summarizing the major ideas behind the design of Etude, I will focus on several specific areas of user interface design, comparing Etude's approach with the appropriate recommendations from the folklore. I will conclude by briefly describing a forthcoming experiment which is intended to determine if adherence to the folklore has in fact produced a system that is easy to use.