Stephen J. Boies

Making usable, useful, productivity-enhancing computer applications

Almost a decade has passed since we started advocating a process of usability design. This article is a status report about the value of this process and, mainly, a description of new ideas for enhancing the use of the process

The 1984 Olympic Message System: a test of behavioral principles of system design

There was more than athletic talent being pressed to peak performance at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Behind the scenes, a multilingual Olympic Message System ran round-the-clock keeping more than 10,000 athletes and officials in contact with families and friends, both far and near.

User behavior on an interactive computer system

Discussed are observations on the usage of an interactive computing system in a research environment. Empirical data on user behavior are discussed that concern the duration and frequency of terminal sessions, the use of language processors, user response time, and command usage.

Speech filing: an office system for principals

Business people spend most of their time communicating, or attempting to communicate, with others. We briefly describe our ideas about these communication activities and their resulting problems, and then discuss an experimental tool we developed to help business people solve some of their communication problems. This tool, called the Speech Filing System, allows users to send messages to anybody in the world and receive messages from anybody in the world, The system offers powerful editing, filing, retrieval, and message distribution and control functions, using pushbutton telephones as the terminals.

Generating highly interactive user interfaces

Developers of User Interface Management Systems (UIMS) have demonstrated that separating the application from its user interface supports device independence and customization. Interfaces produced in UIMS are typically crafted by designers expert in human factors and graphic arts. Little attention has been paid, however, to capturing the knowledge of such experts so that interfaces might be automatically generated by the application of style rules to additional applications. This paper considers how toolkits and style rules can be structured so that the resulting interfaces take advantage of the best human factors and graphic arts knowledge, and are consistently styled.

Writing, Dictating, and Speaking Letters

It is commonly assumed that dictation requires a long time to learn, but authors eventually dictate much faster than they write. Performance results now show that novice dictators can learn in a few hours to dictate with the speed and quality with which they write. However, they do not think they perform this well. Dictators with years of experience are from 0 to 25 percent faster than novices, depending upon the complexity of the letters. Planning time is about two-thirds of composition time, regardless of the method of composition.

Syntactic Errors in Computer Programming

A study of users of a large-scale computer system (TSS/360) revealed that only 12 to 17% of the FORTRAN, PL/I, and Assembler Language computer programs submitted to the language processors contained syntactic errors. Thus, syntactic errors do not appear to be a significant bottleneck in programming. This experiment is part of a larger effort to identify and reduce the behavioral bottlenecks in computer programming.

How Authors Think about Their Writing, Dictating, and Speaking:

A recent study (Gould, 1978) showed that adults, after a few hours practice, dictate one-page letters of various complexities as well as they write them. This was true for time to compose and for quality of the resulting letters as judged by outside raters. These results are contrary to the common assumption that dictating requires a long time to learn. Why then do people not dictate more often? This study tested the hypothesis that authors just learning to dictate believe their written documents to be superior to their dictated documents. To test this, adult subjects, after being trained to dictate, composed letters of various complexities, sometimes writing them and sometimes dictating them. They were required to rate a letters quality three times: immediately after composing it, after receiving it back from the typist and proof-editing it, and two weeks later. The results confirmed the hypothesis: subjects initially rated their written letters superior to their dictated letters, but subsequently both they and others (“recipients”) rated them as equivalent.

Using a touchscreen for simple tasks

Abstract This work was done in the context of an interdisciplinary project (called ITS) aimed at producing new tools for computer application development. One motivation is to provide designers with a computer-based toolkit from which they can select human-computer interaction techniques appropriate to various contexts and conditions. These experiments extend our work to touchscreens, and provide a basis of comparison with keyboards and arrow keys. Three human-computer interaction methods, including basic entry and autocompletion, were studied in two simple laboratory scenarios: participants specified dates and airlines reservations. Autocompletion was preferred over, and was faster than, basic entry. The a priori countable, minimum number of touches required to use a particular interaction method is a good predictor of how much time people will need to use that interaction method on a particular task. Similar results were found previously with keyboards and arrow keys.

Generating user interfaces: principles and use of it style rules

As application developers today we all face a problem of great complexity. Because of the diversity of our users, and the variety of their equipment, applications must run in many different configurations. They must support displays of varying size, resolution, and color depth. Different types of input devices are required, from keyboards to touch screens. Applications must run in different countries, being able to reformat messages in varying lengths in each language. Messages should be available in large font sizes for vision impaired users. Interface style should be consistent with other applications running on similar hardware. Style should at the same time conform to guidelines being developed by many organizations for presentation and interaction behaviors.