Reducing manual labor: An experimental analysis of learning AIDS for a text editor

It is by now a truism to say that computational systems should be designed with ease of use in mind. Indeed, Shneiderman [10] collects together nearly a dozen lists of advice produced by authors in the past decade on how to meet this laudable goal. The advice that is given seems often to be quite good, but it is almost always qualitative in nature, rather vague, and sometimes contradictory. Remarkably little work has been done examining the actual usefulness of carrying out some of the advice, the extent of savings that can be realized by so doing, or the theoretical rationale behind it. In this paper we will present the rationale for investigating two variables that may aid the user, in particular the novice user, and we will describe an extensive experiment designed to examine the actual effects of these two variables. The goals of the work are (1) to understand better the acquisition, representation, and utilization of knowledge by novice or occasional users of computer-based information systems, and (2) to put to the test some ideas derived from current views of memory and attention.