Efficient Computer-User Interface in Electronic Mail Systems
Abstract This paper explores the question of improving the user-computer interface. The approach is one of observing and codifying various parameters that influence the efficiency of the interface in the context of electronic mail tasks. First, we observe “expert” and “regular” users of a mail system and identify the sources of efficiency. The data indicates that experts use a different, more specialized set of commands in performing standard mail tasks. While experts perform these tasks with fewer errors and more “completely”, it is not clear that they achieve this any faster than regular users. Recommendations for system design are made. In addition, errors made by subjects are codified. The major proportion of errors observed fall under syntactic and typographical categories. Implications for error recovery and prevention are discussed.