Author:
Borman Lorraine,Karr Rosemary
Abstract
The decade of the Sixties served to introduce most university campuses to the computer; the Seventies brought the computer, via a terminal, into every facet of university life. Computing in the Eighties will cause every university and college to evaluate and reconsider its exploitation of modern computing equipment for education and research.For example, at Northwestern University, it was recognized that continued growth in timesharing would be a major factor in computing at NU in the 1980s and that this growth would come from a large community of new users and of casual users. In January 1980, the Computing Center began a long-range planning study. A five-year equipment enhancement and replacement plan was to be developed which was intended to reverse an unsatisfactory trend toward computer saturation, to further improve and modernize our computer offerings, and to ensure that NU remained on a path of excellence in computing. Since time-sharing had already increased to over 50% of the total usage of the computer, a decision was made to begin the evaluation of modern timesharing systems, with special emphasis in two areas: 1) efficiency and reliability, and 2) the user interface.This paper describes the processes which were developed and used for the evaluation of the user interface, or as it came to be known, the "friendliness" study [1].
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Reference7 articles.
1. ANSI Subcommittee X3H1 OSCRL User Requirements Doc. No. X3H105- SD Rev.5 79.08.08; OSCRL Design Criteria Doc.No. X3H107SD-Rev.4 80-05-15; OSCRL Functional Requirements Doc. No. X3H106-SD Rev. 4 79-10-19. ANSI Subcommittee X3H1 OSCRL User Requirements Doc. No. X3H105- SD Rev.5 79.08.08; OSCRL Design Criteria Doc.No. X3H107SD-Rev.4 80-05-15; OSCRL Functional Requirements Doc. No. X3H106-SD Rev. 4 79-10-19.
2. The reference to "actual observables" was found in the literature. However the citation has been lost. The reference to "actual observables" was found in the literature. However the citation has been lost.
3. As it turned out use by other members of the staff was minimal. Only one person used the systems in the requested manner: writing a program that had some meaning debugging it and executing it. A very few other people "played around" especially trying the HELP commands available on one of the systems. Thus the second component of the methodology—measurement of the "actual observables"—was essentially limited to our work alone. This was not as great a limitation as it might appear. Together we brought to the project a composite 35 years of experience working with a broad range of users. This user orientation together with our preliminary work developing the Checklist gave us we believe an informed and balanced approach. As it turned out use by other members of the staff was minimal. Only one person used the systems in the requested manner: writing a program that had some meaning debugging it and executing it. A very few other people "played around" especially trying the HELP commands available on one of the systems. Thus the second component of the methodology—measurement of the "actual observables"—was essentially limited to our work alone. This was not as great a limitation as it might appear. Together we brought to the project a composite 35 years of experience working with a broad range of users. This user orientation together with our preliminary work developing the Checklist gave us we believe an informed and balanced approach.
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4 articles.
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