Supporting Novice to Expert Transitions in User Interfaces

In the paper

“They explained this effect with reference to the learner's total cognitive load: When task demands are low, learners benefit from practice conditions that increase total load, whereas when task demands are high, practice conditions with more manageable workload are beneficial.”

What the sources say

• Supported

  The section “Do Complex Skills Late in Practice Operate Similarly to Simple Skills Early in Practice?” (page unavailable) explicitly says low-demand motor skills benefit from practice that increases load, while skills placing extremely high loads on the learner benefit from reducing that load to manageable levels. It frames difficulty in terms of demands on the learner’s cognitive-motor resources. (LLM, conf=0.94)

  cites Wulf and Shea [2002] source

In the paper

“Many interfaces allow access to extensive functionality, often including hundreds or thousands of commands [Hsi and Potts 2000;McGrenere et al. 2007], yet users typically know only a small subset.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Hsi and Potts 2000 source
• Supported

  The H1 Usage Hypothesis section reports approximately 203 functions available in MS Word 2000, supporting the cited point that an interface can offer hundreds of commands. The Introduction also describes expanding feature lists, menus, and toolbars. No page number is available in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.86)

  cites McGrenere et al. 2007 source

In the paper

“Naturally, learning and skill acquisition have been the focus of substantial research in the psychology literature.”

In the paper

“interfaces explicitly designed for experts (e.g., keyboard shortcuts or command-line interaction) allow high levels of performance but only after extensive training”

In the paper

“often the user's source of last resort [Randall and Pedersen 1998]”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Randall and Pedersen 1998 source

In the paper

“spatial and proprioceptive memory strongly influence the user's ability to rapidly acquire interface targets”

In the paper

“The tendency for users to asymptote at mediocre performance has serious and enduring implications for the productivity of millions of office workers.”

In the paper

“Both biases lead users to continue with known methods of interaction, causing an associated tendency to miss opportunities for improvement.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Carroll and Rossen 1987

In the paper

“The problem of users failing to achieve expertise has been shown in many studies across a wide range of interactive tasks and contexts.”

In the paper

“Although the productivity loss associated with each command selection is relatively small, these losses are multiplied across dozens of selections of each command per day”

In the paper

“It describes how skills are developed through cognitive, associative, and autonomous phases”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Fitts and Posner 1967

In the paper

“During the cognitive phase, initial conceptions of the activity are formed, predominantly learning what activities are to be done.”

In the paper

“with Fitts and Posner's [1967] three-stage model being particularly influential”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Fitts and Posner 1967

In the paper

“The associative phase is enduring, with many tasks requiring years or decades of practice before transitioning from the associative phase to automaticity.”

In the paper

“The autonomous phase represents the ultimate level of psychomotor learning, one that is attained after prolonged and extensive practice.”

In the paper

“The typical design of GUIs, therefore, allows users to quickly learn suboptimal methods for task completion (e.g., by pointing and clicking), which users tend to maintain for months, years, and decades of subsequent interaction.”

In the paper

“standard GUI mechanisms such as visual search and direct manipulation, which are easy to understand but that force the experienced user into relatively slow and laborious action”

In the paper

“human memory is the repository for human experiences and understanding, so anything that has been learned is encoded in some form of memory”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Schmidt and Lee 2011

In the paper

“Schneider and Shiffrin [1977] identified the following characteristics of controlled interaction: (1) It is slow; (2) it is attention-demanding, in that other similar tasks interfere with its execution; (3) it is serial in nature; and (4) it is strongly volitional, in that the activities can be avoided or immediately stopped.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Schneider and Shiffrin 1977

In the paper

“Recently, however, there has been an increase in literature explicitly addressing the problem of how interfaces can be designed to promote and assist expert levels of performance.”

In the paper

“Schneider and Shiffrin [1977] identified the following characteristics of autonomous actions: (1) They are fast; (2) they are not attention demanding, in that other verbal or cognitive operations do not interfere with their execution; (3) they are parallel in nature, with various operations possibly occurring together; and (4) they are not volitional, in that processing is often unavoidable.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Schneider and Shiffrin 1977

In the paper

“Despite this variance, task performance improvements are largest during the cognitive phase.”

In the paper

“once a suboptimal strategy has been learned and reproduced several times, it is likely to become habit, further reducing the likelihood of changing to faster alternative methods”

In the paper

“the need for different movements to a target dependent on varied initial cursor location may impair the ultimate performance ceiling and ability to attain autonomous levels of performance with mouse and cursor interaction”

In the paper

“the guidance hypothesis [Schmidt 1991] suggests that augmented feedback that improves early performance through guidance may impair retention of the performed skills once the guidance is removed.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Schmidt 1991 source

In the paper

“The efficacy of certain training interventions has been demonstrated to interact with individual and environmental factors, which greatly complicates the process of determining which training methods are likely to be most effective for different people in different settings.”

In the paper

“In an experiment on learning letter locations, the frost brushing condition was rated as more engaging and less frustrating than the normal interface; but an experiment involving the harder task of learning gesture shapes for entire words showed the frost brushing interface to be less engaging and more frustrating than normal.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Cockburn et al. [2007]

In the paper

“there is evidence that personality differences such as introversion and extroversion result in different baselines of arousal, and, consequently, the same stimulus effect may increase performance for an extrovert while decreasing performance for an introvert [Revelle et al. 1980;Bullock and Gilliland 1993].”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Revelle et al. 1980 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Bullock and Gilliland 1993 source

In the paper

“The notion that controls should be visible to be learned is also well expressed in most usability guidelines, but the corollary of making novice functionality visible is that expert functions are often suppressed, thus reducing the likelihood that they will be discovered.”

In the paper

“Two key strategies for improving motivation are to make the task seem important and to use goal setting [Schmidt and Lee 2011].”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Schmidt and Lee 2011

In the paper

“Each method has associated performance characteristics, including a performance floor and ceiling, and each user will have attained performance ability somewhere between the floor and ceiling.”

In the paper

“Deliberate practice facilitates two kinds of learning: improving skills already attained and extending the reach and range of skills; it is further assisted through expert mediation, such as skilled coaching.”

In the paper

“A related concept is that appropriate interface controls should be”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Karat et al. 2000 source

In the paper

“Positive motivation to learn and improve is a key determinant in whether a learner chooses to participate in practice.”

In the paper

“Perkins-Ceccato et al. [2003] showed that low-skill golfers benefited more from instruction that focused attention on internal motor aspects of actions when compared to instructions that focused on external effects on the ball; conversely, highly skilled golfers benefited more from externally focused instructions.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Perkins-Ceccato et al. [2003] source

In the paper

“When an interface is spatially stable, users can make rapid decisions about the location of target items, but when stability is compromised users must resort to comparatively slow visual search [Cockburn et al. 2007;Cockburn and Gutwin 2009].”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Cockburn et al. 2007
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Cockburn and Gutwin 2009 source

In the paper

“Without prior experience to draw on, novice users are heavily reliant on visual search, and the time for visual search is a linear function of the number of candidate items that must be considered [Hornof and Kieras 1997;Wolfe 1998;Cockburn et al. 2007;Cockburn and Gutwin 2009].”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Hornof and Kieras 1997 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Wolfe 1998 source
• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Cockburn et al. 2007

In the paper

“Dyck et al. [2003] observe that many computer games achieve the dual objectives of availability without obstruction through”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Dyck et al. [2003] source

In the paper

“rest periods between sessions improve learning, with longer rest periods being more beneficial than short ones”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Bourne and Archer 1956 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Baddeley and Longman 1978 source

In the paper

“although it is known that performance generally follows an inverted U shape with level of arousal (i.e., performance deteriorates when a person is under-or overexcited)”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Revelle et al. 1980 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Bullock and Gilliland 1993 source

In the paper

“The results suggest that there is a fine balance between engaging and frustrating users and that training interfaces should be neither too mundane nor too difficult.”

In the paper

“Importantly, automaticity allows the performer to think about higher level tasks during the execution of the skill.”

In the paper

“Highly skilled task performance is characterized by automaticity, where the physical actions required for the task are executed quickly, efficiently, and with minimal conscious deliberation.”

In the paper

“he contends that elite performance require deliberate practice to counteract automaticity during practice, with performers using various forms of mental representations to maintain the cognitive and associative phases [Ericsson 2004]”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Ericsson 2004 source

In the paper

“including the observation that some factors assisting performance at one stage can impair performance at another.”

In the paper

“Armstrong [1970] showed that for learning complex elbow movements, mechanical limb control resulted in precise movements during training but inaccurate reproduction once the controls were released.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Armstrong 1970 source

In the paper

“They postulated that the strength of a memory is a positive function of the depth to which the stimulus is analyzed.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Craik and Lockhart 1972 source

In the paper

“Several factors influence the rate at which performance increases after initial familiarization, including the effort required during training and the use of guidance to assist performance.”

In the paper

“However, by presenting different interfaces to novice and expert users, there are risks of confusing users when making a transition to the more advanced UI (introducing a”

In the paper

“brushing condition improved users' memory of letter locations and of gesture shapes better compared to the traditional keyboard display (memory for gesture shapes was measured by asking users to create word gestures on a blank keyboard, with gesture quality reported by a recognition engine score function).”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Cockburn et al. [2007]

In the paper

“Typically, gamification is used to increase the user's motivation to engage in an activity and to improve his or her performance at it, although other benefits such as increased collaboration and creative leadership may also occur [Reeves and Read 2009].”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Reeves and Read 2009

In the paper

“An initial user study showed that users could locate unfamiliar commands in an interface much faster when using ShowMeHow”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Ramesh et al. 2011 source

In the paper

“their lab studies showed that users found gamified calibration procedures to be significantly more enjoyable without compromising the calibration outcomes.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Flatla et al. 2011 source

In the paper

“Marking menus were designed to adhere to a set of design guidelines, including revelation, guidance, and rehearsal [Kurtenbach et al. 1994], as follows:”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Kurtenbach et al. 1994

In the paper

“Their findings showed that users are biased toward procedures that are (1) well-practiced and generic and (2) composed of interactive components that are fast and incremental.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Fu and Gray [2004]

In the paper

“Similarly, the methods used for explicit task instruction (described in Section 7) could also be used to extend the user's vocabulary.”

In the paper

“These results have important implications for the design of training systems because designers must understand whether their goal is to assist users in rapidly attaining high performance or whether learned outcomes and the ability to transfer the learning to related interactions are primary objectives.”

In the paper

“The conceptual deterrents and barriers to vocabulary extension are similar to those described for intermodal improvement: Users need to be aware of commands before using them, and they need to understand the magnitude of improvement that they will enable.”

In the paper

“Similarly, studies have consistently shown that keyboard shortcuts offer a higher performance ceiling than does mouse selection [Odell et al. 2004;Lane et al. 2005;Malacria et al. 2013], yet Tak et al. [2013] found that some participants did not use known hotkeys because they believed toolbar selections were faster.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Odell et al. 2004
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Lane et al. 2005 source
• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Malacria et al. 2013

In the paper

“OctoPocus was evaluated in comparison to traditional Help menus and marking menus and showed positive results.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Bau and Mackay 2008 source

In the paper

“Their results showed that forced use and audio feedback worked well, with 72.8% and 66.6% respectively of experimental selections completed with hotkeys, and no adverse subjective response.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Grossman et al. [2007] source

In the paper

“Adar et al. [2013] provide a general discussion of the role of”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Adar et al. [2013] source

In the paper

“Task completion rates were higher and frustration lower when using FollowUs.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Lafreniere et al. 2013 source

In the paper

“Importantly, though, several studies have demonstrated that predicted and actual experience differ (e.g., Czerwinski et al. [2001]) and that users can mistrust their abilities, leading to underestimates of potential benefit with the new modality.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Czerwinski et al. [2001]

In the paper

“Although experiments showed these methods to be successful in increasing hotkey use, forced use of hotkeys and audio feedback may be unacceptable to users outside lab settings.”

In the paper

“Although empirical results for CLI benefits over GUIs have been mixed (e.g., Whiteside et al. [1985]), it is widely accepted that CLIs enable higher efficiency, and power users are strong advocates (e.g., Barrett et al. [2004]).”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Whiteside et al. [1985]
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Barrett et al. [2004] source

In the paper

“Their results confirmed the guidance hypothesis: The conditions that maximized performance during training (static-and dynamic-tracing conditions) performed the worst in the retention tests and vice versa.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Anderson and Bischof [2013] source

In the paper

“Navigating through these partitions takes time, and, consequently, there are potential performance benefits in flattening the command structure to make more items accessible at once [Scarr et al. 2012].”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Scarr et al. 2012 source

In the paper

“The existence of this performance dip is likely to deter users from switching to new methods for interaction, even though doing so may offer long-term productivity gains-the prospect of encountering a short-term productivity loss may cause users to postpone switching to the new method, possibly forever.”

In the paper

“Users' interactive behavior is often repetitive (e.g., command use [Greenberg and Witten 1993] and web navigation [Tauscher and Greenberg 1997]), and interfaces can aid efficiency by explicitly supporting command repetition.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Greenberg and Witten 1993 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Tauscher and Greenberg 1997 source

In the paper

“Spatial audio was included to assist memorization of place, and their results showed a 56% increase in object memory compared to standard desktop systems.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Tan et al. [2001] source

In the paper

“These results reflect those generated by Cockburn et al.'s [2007] frost-brushing experiments, in which the frost-brushing condition slowed user performance during training but resulted in better results during subsequent testing conditions.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Cockburn et al. [2007]

In the paper

“Evaluation results of their Com-munityCommands system suggest that an item-based collaborative filtering algorithm performs best, generating the highest number of useful recommendations, as well as the fewest number of unuseful ones.”

In the paper

“Human factors literature, summarized in Section 2, shows that many factors influence skill acquisition.”

In the paper

“Open source systems permit modifications that enable the longitudinal analysis of expert use (e.g., Murphy et al.'s [2006] analysis of Java developers using the Eclipse IDE), but, for productivity applications, the user base is often smaller than for major commercial systems.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Murphy et al. 2006 source

In the paper

“Interaction with computing systems introduces new and important factors that have not been extensively studied.”

In the paper

“Focus-shifts cause only a brief attention switch and cause less disruption.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Bødker 1995

In the paper

“However, these techniques have several limitations, including access to only a subset of controls, reduced system responsiveness, and increased frequency of software crashes, which make them impractical for studies of real use.”

In the paper

“Research by Bødker [1995] suggests that there are two types of task interruption: breakdowns and focus-shifts.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Bødker 1995

In the paper

“Typically, these APIs form part of the accessibility framework that assists development of software for users with special needs.”

In the paper

“Unlike buttons, scrollbars, and other graphical widgets that afford a particular method for activation (clicking, dragging, etc.), gestural interactions need not be conducted with reference to specific graphical entities.”

In the paper

“Generation mechanisms should produce recommendations that are both new to the user and useful given his or her current context and task.”

In the paper

“Marking menus were designed to adhere to a set of design guidelines, including revelation, guidance, and rehearsal[Kurtenbach et al. 1994], as follows:”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Kurtenbach et al. 1994

In the paper

“Encouraging users to reflect on their performance may assist in reducing the tendency to persistently maintain suboptimal methods.”

In the paper

“Current interface guidelines attempt to account for novice learning and expertise by advocating for shortcut facilities, but this strategy is known to fail because few users make the transition to expert methods-instead, users maintain the adequate but inefficient strategies they learned first.”

In the paper

“In other words, the novice's motor actions should rehearse the expert's motor actions to assist the development of automaticity and muscle memory.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Kurtenbach et al. 1994

In the paper

“Most of this review has focused on task performance time, but accuracy and the cost of errors are often critical to successful interaction, and they can vary substantially between interaction techniques.”

In the paper

“GUIs have become the primary medium through which office work is conducted.”

In the paper

“For example, Olson and Nilsen [1988] showed that users who knew two methods for entering formulae into a spreadsheet were significantly slower than users who knew only one, and they attributed the time cost to the additional cognition required to plan and decide between methods.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Olson and Nilsen 1988

In the paper

“Kurtenbach et al.'s marking menu research was conducted in the early 1990s, with a focus on stylusbased input.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Kurtenbach 1993

In the paper

“However, developing systems that can be used in field studies of real work is extremely difficult.”

In the paper

“The presentation of training information should fit within the user's current context and should avoid interruptions that break the flow of work.”

In the paper

“Methods for intermodal improvement, such as keyboard accelerators, are already commonly used in state-of-the-art interfaces.”

In the paper

“Initially (left), three alternative gesture commands are possible, but as the user gestures upward and rightward, guidance for Paste is removed and Cut fades, leaving only the remaining guidance for Copy.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Bau and Mackay 2008 source

In the paper

“gamification can increase engagement and performance”

In the paper

“A primary factor contributing to their success is the ease with which they can be learnednewcomers can quickly attain sufficient competence to adequately complete their work.”

In the paper

“The software that people use for everyday office work is often proprietary, and the lack of access to source code constrains researchers' ability to modify system behavior and monitor its use.”

In the paper

“Presentation should be dynamically updated to the user's context, should be continuously available to the user, and should be presented in an ambient manner that allows quick access without interrupting task execution.”

In the paper

“When source code is unavailable, there are often Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow limited control of software systems running on a particular platform.”

In the paper

“Patina uses a colored heatmap to recommend commands to users.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Matejka et al. 2013 source

In the paper

“Although ease of learning is highly desirable, it is common for office workers to continue using substantially similar interfaces for months, years, and decades, so that optimizing designs for initial learnability rather than long-term efficiency can be counterproductive.”

In the paper

“Two important parts of vocabulary extension are the generation of good recommendations and the presentation of those recommendations in the interface.”