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James E. Palmer

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James E. Palmer

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Publications by James E. Palmer (bibliography)

» 1993 «

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Duffy, Thomas M., Palmer, James E. and Mehlenbacher, Brad (1993): Online Help: Design and Evaluation. Norwood, NJ, Intellect
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» 1989 «

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Mehlenbacher, Brad, Duffy, Thomas M. and Palmer, James E. (1989): Finding Information on a Menu: Linking Menu Organization to the User's Goals. In Human-Computer Interaction, 4 (3) pp. 231-251

“Design paradigms often ignore the diverse goals users bring to the computer interface. Any human-computer interaction can be viewed as a marriage of two systems: The user begins the interaction by formulating an information goal, and the computer software meets that goal with a sometimes complex list of potential topic areas. The user then accesses that topic list through the computer interface. Part of the act of accessing the topic list is selecting a potential topic, and this action is often supported by a menu interface. Although research is pervasive on how best to organize menu items to facilitate learning, search speed, and reduced selection errors, little has been done to examine the impact of different types of user goals or cues on a menu's effectiveness. In a study using three distinct cues -- direct match, synonym, and iconic -- and two menu organizations -- alphabetical and functional -- data suggest that (a) the functional menu is more effective than the alphabetical menu for the synonym and iconic cues, (b) learning occurs with both menu designs (i.e., selection speed increases rapidly across the five trial blocks), and (c) users make fewer errors with the functionally organized menu. The results, in general, encourage more rigorous investigation of the interaction between the tasks users bring to menu interfaces and the optimal design of those menus.”

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» 1987 «

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Palmer, James E., Duffy, Thomas M., Gomoll, Kathleen M., Gomoll, Thomas, Palmquist-Richards, Jessica and Trumble, John A. (1987): The Design and Evaluation of Online Help for UNIX Emacs: Access Mechanisms. In: Bullinger, Hans-Jorg and Shackel, Brian (eds.) INTERACT 87 - 2nd IFIP International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction September 1-4, 1987, Stuttgart, Germany. pp. 461-466.

“We discuss the use of the card sort technique and cluster analysis for determining an effective organization for a help menu in Unix EMACS. We gathered similarity data using a card sorting task with EMACS commands. We then used hierarchical cluster analysis to analyze the data. The results indicate that differences among novices, intermediates, and experts appear with computer-based concepts such as windows and buffers, but that the sorts are more similar than they are different. We argue that cluster analysis may aid designers in determining a functional organization, but that in our domain, this organization will not help users bridge the mapping from real world tasks to computer tasks.”

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» 1983 «

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Duffy, Thomas M., Palmer, James E. and Mehlenbacher, Brad (1983): Online Help: Design and Evaluation. Norwood, NJ, Intellect
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Changes to this page (author)

24 Feb 2010: Enabled abstracts to be shown on James E. Palmer's author page.
30 Sep 2007: Author was edited (approved by an editor)

27 Jun 2007: Author was edited
28 Apr 2003: Added the author to the bibliography

Publication statistics

Publication period:1983-1993
Publication count:4
Number of co-authors:6

Productive colleagues

James E. Palmer's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

Brad Mehlenbacher:15
Thomas M. Duffy:6
Kathleen M. Gomoll:3

Collaboration count

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Thomas M. Duffy:4
Brad Mehlenbacher:3
John A. Trumble:1

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“ The computer can be thought of from the perspective of its technology [...] from the field of computer science. Or it can be thought of as a social tool, a structure that will change social interaction and social policy, for better or for worse. It can be thought of as a personal assistant, where the goals and intentions of the user become of primary concern. It can be viewed from the experience of the user, a view that changes considerably with the task, the person, the design of the system. The filed of human-computer interaction needs all these views, all these issues, and more besides. ”

-- Stephen Draper and Donald Norman. In "User Centered System Design" (1986) p. 1 ”

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James E. Palmer

Publications by James E. Palmer (bibliography)

» 1993 «

» 1989 «

» 1987 «

» 1983 «

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Eva Hornecker on Tangible Interaction

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