Teresa L. Roberts

The Xerox Star: a retrospective

A description is given of the Xerox 8010 Star information system, which was designed as an office automation system. The idea was that professionals in a business or organization would have workstations on their desks and would use them to produce, retrieve, distribute, and organize documentation, presentations, memos, and reports. All of the workstations in an organization would be connected via Ethernet and would share access to file servers, printers, etc. The distinctive features of Star are identified, and changes to the original design are examined. A history of Star development is included. Some lessons learned from designing Star are related.<<ETX>>

Evaluation of text editors

This paper presents a methodology for evaluating computer text editors from the viewpoint of their users—from novices learning the editor to dedicated experts who have mastered the editor. The dimensions which this methodology addresses are: —<italic>Time</italic> to perform edit tasks by experts. —<italic>Errors</italic> made by experts. —<italic>Learning</italic> of basic edit tasks by novices. —<italic>Functionality</italic> over all possible edit tasks. The methodology is objective and thorough, yet easy to use. The criterion of <italic>objectivity</italic> implies that the evaluation scheme not be biased in favor of any particular editors conceptual model—its way of representing text and operations on the text. In addition, data is gathered by observing people who are equally familiar with each system. <italic>Thoroughness</italic> implies that several different aspects of editor usage be considered. <italic>Ease-of-use</italic> means that methodology is usable by editor designers, managers of word processing centers, or other non-psychologists who need this kind of information, but have limited time and equipment resources. In this paper, we explain the methodology first, then give some interesting empirical results from applying it to several editors.

The effects of device technology on the usability of advanced telephone functions

This paper presents a pilot study that addresses the effect that device technology has on the usability of advanced telephone functions. We prototyped telephone systems using three technologies: the current 12-button phone set, the current phone set augmented with speech synthesis, and a phone set augmented with a display and pointing device. The functions that we offered included call routing, call screening, and message retrieval. Experiments showed that a display-based phone was the fastest to use and was preferred; an interface that used voice-prompting was the slowest and least liked. This points out that future work on prompting interfaces will have to address user control and efficiency issues without causing learning/forgetting problems.

Chapter 29 – Text Editors

Publisher Summary In studying text editing, the user frequently needs to interact with other areas of a computer system in the process of editing a document. The user might want to find out the name of a file on his workstation or on a public file server; the user might want to send off a piece of electronic mail asking for some information and then read the response; the user might want to perform a quick calculation or a detailed statistical analysis, and incorporate the results directly into the document. The user would like to do all of these things without interrupting the flow of editing, either by having to close down the editing of a current document or by having to wait a long time while another process gets started. There can be certain conveniences built into the text editor to allow the most common of interruptions, such as looking at the names of that user other files or receiving some electronic mail.