An ease of use evaluation of an integrated document processing system

Designers of systems intended to be easy to use have many guidelines available to them in the literature. Most of these recommendations are based on the intuition and experiences of particular designers with particular systems. Very few of them have been evaluated experimentally, so one must be cautious not to attribute more authority to these guidelines than they deserve [6]. This paper summarizes the results of an experimental evaluation of the Etude text processing system [8]. Section 2 provides a brief overview of Etude. Section 3 describes the development of suitable ease of use criteria. Section 4 presents the experimental protocol. Section 5 discusses the results of the evaluation. A complete description of the experiment can be found in [7].

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