John B. Black
ABSTRACT
Natural language would seem to have a strong effect on users' behavior with artificial command languages for interacting with computer systems.
We can divide the potential effects of natural language on command languages into: (a) effects on the names of commands, (b) effects on command arguments, and (c) effects on how command-argument units are interrelated (see Black and Sebrechts [2]). Others have investigated arguments (Barnard et al. [1]) and command-argument interrelations (Carroll [4]). In this paper, we describe our research concerning the first of these—namely, how the names of commands effect the learnability and memorability of the commands. Our investigation uses text-editing as the specific domain.
Applied research in human-computer interaction is a subtle affair, with many pitfalls awaiting the unwary researcher. Thus, in addition to presenting research results, we will conclude this paper with some methodological lessons.
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Index Terms
- Learning and remembering command names
Recommendations
Evaluating the suggestiveness of command names
CHI '82: Proceedings of the 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsAn important feature of the design of human-computer interfaces is that of command languages: the vocabulary and syntax that allow a user to express commands to the system. If we look at command languages from the standpoint of natural languages, rather ...
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