de@dcl-cs.UUCP (David England) (06/25/85)
Eat me. We're doing some work here on improving the user interface to existing unix tools. One of the problems we were discussing is how far you can take the do-what-i-mean approach in an environment for non-casual users. For example you could prompt for or correct missing or invalid parameters but how far do you want to take this ? I come down on the user-centred view that the system should not try to second guess the user but only do what was clearly intended, others here disagree slightly saying that you should build more 'knowledge' of the system into commands to aid the user. Ideally the system should be able to adapt to the requirements of different levels of user-skill but that's another story ... Does anyone out there in net.land who has been working on predictive systems or syntax-directed editors have any views or some user reaction to some system control of user interfaces? Any replies (via E-mail) gratefully received. -- UUCP: ...!seismo!mcvax!ukc!icdoc!dcl-cs!de DARPA: de%lancs.comp@ucl-cs | Post: University of Lancaster, JANET: de@uk.ac.lancs.comp | Department of Computing, Phone: +44 524 65201 Ext. 4586 | Bailrigg, Lancaster, UK. Project:Alvey ECLIPSE User Interface | LA1 4YR