Yet, research in human-computer interaction barely acknowledges the command line's existence. It's a strange omission, since the core principles of human factors engineering still apply to the console.
Why is this? I've also noticed a corollary, that interface testing for "experts" doesn't really use expert testing. One paper I've read (name eludes me) about text editor usability had the nominal "expert" users ignoring regular expression searching, and just scrolling about randomly for the assigned phrase.
Either truly "expert" users are so few and far between that researchers can't find them, or the researchers can't tell who qualifies as an "expert" and who doesn't.
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The money quote (of the analytical section):
Yet, research in human-computer interaction barely acknowledges the command line's existence. It's a strange omission, since the core principles of human factors engineering still apply to the console.
Why is this? I've also noticed a corollary, that interface testing for "experts" doesn't really use expert testing. One paper I've read (name eludes me) about text editor usability had the nominal "expert" users ignoring regular expression searching, and just scrolling about randomly for the assigned phrase.
Either truly "expert" users are so few and far between that researchers can't find them, or the researchers can't tell who qualifies as an "expert" and who doesn't.
Or, most text files are small.