Sharon.Burks@A.CS.CMU.EDU (03/14/86)
THOMAS MORAN, Xerox PARC Wednesday, March 19 4:00 PM WeH 7500 FACING THE USER It is about time that we design workstations that can really help users engage in extended intellectual tasks. Advances in workstation technology, which are easing the obvious technological limitations (eg, memory, speed, or screen space), will not automatically solve the problem. Rather, they will begin to expose our lack of understanding of users and their tasks. Several important cognitive and social features of users must be confronted or exploited: In complex tasks such as scientific research, engineering design, or legal analysis, we find users struggling and exploring; their understanding of their tasks evolve from vague thoughts to sensible structured ideas. They are continually learning about the system as well as their task. They are doing many different things at the same time. They cooperate and collaborate. They form informal communities. To design a workstation for this user, I will advocate a strategy based on the notion of an evolvable system -- an interactive system that can evolve with the user through his phases of understanding. According to this strategy, the system should be based on direct-manipulation editing and structuring. The system should be built on a simple ontological world which the user is encouraged to evolve with his task. The system should support explicit idea processing: the generation, representation, and exploration of idea structures. It should exploit animated spatial representations of structures. It should reify the user's process of exploration. Finally, a community should be grown along with the system to support mutual learning. Progress on several user science issues are needed to provide a foundation for such systems: analyses of large-scale cognitive and social processes, refined models of cognitive skill, models of consistency to support learning and understanding, models of the use of external memories, and models of human-machine interaction.