A Theory of Stimulus-Response Compatibility Applied to Human-Computer Interaction 1

My search was for “compatibility” and “human computer interaction”. I was thinking of the Don Norman kind of compatibility. This doesn’t seem like that kind of compatibility, but I think I know also what’s going on here having read the first 60 or so pages of UTC.

the theory which produces and excellent quantitative fit

A theory which produces fit to the data. Note to self: brush up on stats.

SRC. I think i was just getting to this part in UTC.

degree of difficulty of a response
depends on
the complexity complexity of the relationship between:
the set of stimuli
and the set each’s corresponding responses

A measure of complexity.

SRC was first characterized by Fitts and Seeger (1953) and is well known in human- operator situations (i.e., the up-elevator button is never put below the down-elevator button).

Wait.. yeah that is what I’m looking for! And so compatibility is what again? .. complelxity of relationships.. stimulus response.

indices of difficulty are response time, number of errors made, learning times, and preferences.

I understand this list except for preferences. What does that mean?

data base

Two words.
It was the 80s.
Haiku?

the abbreviation encoding task

I hadn’t thought about this in terms of a mental task someone would take on. At my job, people use abbreviations codes to denote locations. MEMH is a logistics hub in Memphis for example. I don’t know how I would think about this as a mental task or how I would measure, GOMS-style just recalling this location code. I’m guessing other people didn’t either and they did a bunch of experiments to find out. That’s the data maybe we’re going to create a theory to fit.

Because an abbreviation technique is just a specification of a mapping between a set of stimuli and a set of responses,

Ah, that word: specification. Like a machine, a function, a transformation, input and output Ah! I think I just made a match myself, from UTC and this paper.

command abbreviations

Bloomberg?

metric for compatibility

Music to my ears. That’s what I’m here for. Could you tell me if this icon is more compatible, a stronger choice given an audience than that one?

he greater the word-abbreviation similarity, the easier the abbreviations would be to generate, recall, or interpret

Okay, but no chunking fanciness needed? maybe that’s what menus are for and you have to start somewhere.

emacs

Very interesting. When I think about all the vim commands I know I see a new relevance for this.


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