CHI

This paper describes an intelligent system to help people share and filter information communicated by computer-based messaging systems. The system exploits concepts from artificial intelligence such as frames, production rules, and inheritance networks,...

Creating and debugging knowledge-based systems, such as expert systems, requires easy access to rules and facts in a vast, loosely-connected system. Three graphic representations were devised for a system development tool that integrates forward ...

In many contexts, humans often represent their own “neighborhood” in great detail, yet only major landmarks further away. This suggests that such views (“fisheye views”) might be useful for the computer display of large information structures like ...

UC is a natural language computer consultant system for the UNIX operating system. The user model in UC encodes the user's knowledge state and allows UC to tailor its responses to the user. The model encodes apriori knowledge in a double stereotype ...

Tutor 'N' Trainer (TNT) is an automated tutor for vi, the UNIX™ system screen editor. TNT fosters learning by doing. The Tutor component guides the student's practice with spoken instruction and feedback. The Trainer component assures safety during ...

Several hours of advisory protocols from a consultant for Personal Computing were taped and analysed in terms of the role which the advisor played in the interaction. The advisor's role was determined by the user's initial approach and the advisor's ...

It has been argued for a long time that the representation of a problem is of crucial importance to understanding and solving it. Equally accepted is the fact that the human visual system is a powerful system to be used in information processing tasks. ...

In order to make computer programs more readable, understandable, appealing, memorable, and maintainable, the presentation of program source text needs to be enhanced over its conventional treatment. Towards this end, we present five basic design ...

There has been a great interest recently in systems that use graphics to aid in the programming, debugging, and understanding of computer programs. The terms “Visual Programming” and “Program Visualization” have been applied to these systems. Also, ...

A study was conducted to examine knowledge transfer between word processing systems. The study examined the performance of naive subjects learning to use a word processing system, as well as performance of individuals with word processing experience as ...

For a Direct Manipulation interface, transfer of skill between text and graphics editing tasks has been investigated. A learning experiment has been carried out with two groups of novice users starting with a series of sessions in one task domain and ...

All discussions of interface design criteria emphasize the importance of consistent operating procedures both within and across applications. This paper presents a model for positive transfer and thus a theoretical definition of consistency. An ...

It has become a common recommendation to computer interface designers that they should “Know the User” (e.g., Rubinstein and Hersh, 1984). This panel discussion will examine the issues that arise from this advice.

Medical inference problems that seem too complex for intuitive solution can be made tractable if the problem information is presented in the form of a graphic display. The medical cognitive graphics approach to aiding complex problem solving conceives ...

Users of a windowing system were studied for the purpose of creating an empirically based windowing benchmark. Each filled out a paper questionnaire that sampled subjective opinions of windowing commands, and were observed for approximately 22 minutes ...

It is widely believed that overlapping windows are preferable to tiled (non-overlapping) ones, but there is very little research to support that belief. An analysis of the basic characteristics of windowing regimes predicts that there are, in fact, ...

Two experiments examine the effects of incorporating user knowledge into the design of training materials for a database querying system. In Experiment 1 an informal cognitive model of a query language is derived from the verbal reports of expert users, ...

DOMAIN/DELPHI is the retrieval component of Apollo's in-house, integrated publishing system. It retrieves and displays documentation in a networked workstation environment in which each workstation has access to a common database of user and systems ...

The effects of general global documentation, detailed step-by-step documentation, and combined global and detailed documentation were examined for high, medium, and low experienced students. The 198 students in this study used a word-processing program ...

At a time when more and different people are using more and different computer systems, there is growing awareness that if technology is to give companies the “competitive edge” they are seeking, it must be used to support business goals. This means ...

Algorithm animation has an acknowledged and growing role in computer aided algorithm design, as well as in documentation and technology transfer, since the medium of interactive graphics is a broader, richer channel than text by which to communicate ...

A number of constraint-oriented, interactive graphical systems have been constructed. A typical problem in such systems is that, to define a new kind of constraint, the user must leave the graphical domain and write code in the underlying implementation ...

New users of four computer-mediated communication systems were asked to indicate which of a variety of learning modes they had used, including reading written manuals, using online automated help facilities, personal or group lessons from a human ...

Computer-based voice messaging systems are used to send and receive confidential messages via touch-tone telephones. Auditory prompts guide users through a series of menus, listing options as users proceed through their sessions. This report describes ...

In a field study of use of integrated business software by business professionals, we found several characteristics of the real-world situation leading to the under-utilization of integrated software and being of importance for its human factors. ...

Two experiments investigated expert-novice differences in debugging computer programs. Debugging was done on programs provided to the subject, and were run on a microcomputer. The programs were in LOGO in Exp. 1 and Pascal in Exp. 2. Experts debugged ...

The effect of the graphical programming language FPL (First Programming Language) on the occurrence of conceptual bugs in programs written by novices was studied. The type and location for each bug, and the frequency for each type were all recorded ...

In this paper, we investigate whether or not most novice programming bugs arise because students have misconceptions about the semantics of particular language constructs. Three high frequency bugs are examined in detail — one that clearly arises from a ...