As technology changes, it has become common to develop now generations of existing software to reflect these advances. The focus of this research is how changes in the user/computer dialogue structure will affect the performance of users who are familiar with an earlier version of the product. In the case of menu-based systems, changes in new releases frequently involve modification of the underlying menu structure (e.g., IBM DisplayWrite series, DBaseIII -DBaseIII+). We investigated whether changing the semantics and structure of a popular menu-driven word-processor would permit transfer of existing knowledge of the word-processor to the new version.
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/transfer-between-similar-menu-systems-e8zKk81JaF