An Architecture for Intelligent Interfaces: Outline of an Approach to Supporting Operators of Complex Systems

Four experiments were conducted to assess procedures for obtaining and testing user-selected terms for task specific concepts in complex, unfamiliar work processing instructions. Experiment 1 tested user-selected terms against both user-nominated and the original technical terms. The final three experiments employed only the user-selected and technical terms. The effect of terminology on subjects' abilities to follow the instructions were evaluated by measuring errors and task completion times during the practice period. Comprehension of the instructions was assessed by performance on a transfer task. Extensive practice produced acceptable and comparable performance for all term types. However, instruction comprehension, as measured by the transfer task, was clearly influenced by terminology. User-selected word processing terms were more understandable than both user-nominated and the original technical terms. In addition, the present study demonstrated that transfer tasks can be a more sensitive (and often a more appropriate) measure of the goodness of a term than learning measures.