This study compares and assesses the quality of a number of man-machine interfaces in a sample of interactive systems chosen to represent a wide spectrum of different applications, including: text editors, information retrieval, data communication and processing utilities, and programming environments. The purpose of this study is to develop a check-list for comparing and assessing man-machine interfaces, and to illustrate this technique by means of examples. As a consequence of this approach we have observed the widespread existence of application-independent commands in different systems, and we show here how a search for "the simplest interface that does a given job" succeeds in reducing the complexity of the user interface of a widely used interactive system.
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