Adele Goldberg
ABSTRACT
There exists a buzzword in the user interface research community that symbolizes how the user should feel about a computer-based environment in which productive work can be carried out. The buzzword is “friendly.” It is a strange choice of word in that it seems to imply the existence of personal support for the user by a friend, who happens not to be made of flesh and blood, but of metal and electricity. Friends help us. Friends help us learn, help us develop positive situations, helps us understand and get out of negative situations. We like to be around them. The problem of creating a “friendly” programming environment centers on the kind of help the system provides, and the ease with which we can cause the effects we wish to cause. In order to support program development, help takes the form of methods for finding information, methods for accessing existing functionality, methods for describing new programs, and methods for discovering and fixing any faults in those programs. Ideas about the forms of help needed in a system define some of the functionality that ought to exist. In particular, we want to be able to help the user find out what went right, find out what went wrong, find out what can be done next, and find out something about any system component.
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Index Terms
- The influence of an object-oriented language on the programming environment
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