CAN WE EXPECT TO IMPRCWE TEXT EDITING PERFORMANCE?
]David W. Emblej and George Nagy
Deperbnent of Ccmputer Science
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE 68588
IN~ODUCTION
The subject of human factors in cunputing
systems has beoume an intriguing and exciting
field of study.
In the ten years since the
publication of Weinberg's book, ~
~
~
[17], the field has grin
considerably as is evidenced by Shneiderman's
~
[16], which sucve/s current
work and points in directions research might
continue.
One anthology containing many
representative projects is Coumbs and Alty' s
Eusa~/~/i~ ~ ~ ~
~a~Lw~ [6].
One of the active areas is computer text
editing.
At the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
Card, Moran, and Newell have conducted several
studies on the psychology of cumputer text editing
[2, 3, 4, 5]. For her dissertation research at
Stanford University and in cooperation with the
research group at Xerox, Roberts ihas conducted
several experiments to evaluate human factors in
computer text editors and has suggested numerous
others [15]. Ledgard and his colleagues at the
University of Massachusetts have investigated
natural language aspects of text editor command
languages [14]. At the University of Illinois
Hammer and Rouse have investigated freeform text
editing behavior [12], and more recently Hammer
has completed his dissertation on human aspects of
text editing [131.
For some time now we have also been interested
in studying human factors aspects of cum~uter text
editors. We have surveyed the literature [9], and
we have conducted several investigations of our
own [10] ranging from an application of file-
cxmparison algorithms in editor few.arch [i],
through prediction of editing perfozmancs [7], to
the design and implementation of SIMPLE, our own
editing system for beginners [8, ii] ..
Currently we are concentrating our efforts on
gathering data to determine how much time users
spend performing various editing activities. We
intend to extend the work begun in previous
s