Characterizing Large-Scale Use of a Direct Manipulation Application in the Wild

Abstract

Examining large-scale, long-term application use is critical to understanding how an application meets the needs of its user community. However, there have been few published analyses of long-term use of desktop applications, and none that have examined applications that support creating and modifying content using direct manipulation. In this paper, we present an analysis of 2 years of usage data from an instrumented version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, including data from over 200 users. In the course of our analysis, we show that previous findings concerning the sparseness of command use and idiosyncrasy of users' command vocabularies extend to a new domain and interaction style. These findings motivate continued research in adaptive and mixed-initiative interfaces. We also describe the novel application of a clustering technique to characterize a user community's higher-level tasks from low-level logging data.

Publisher Link

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1839218

Citation

Lafreniere, B., Bunt, A., Whissell, J., Clarke, C., and Terry, M. (2010) Characterizing Large-Scale Use of a Direct Manipulation Application in the Wild. Proceedings of Graphics Interface (GI 2010), pp. 11-17.

Bibtext Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS { gi2010,
    AUTHOR = { Benjamin Lafreniere and Andrea Bunt and John Whissell and Charlie Clarke and Michael Terry },
    TITLE = { Characterizing Large-Scale Use of a Direct Manipulation Application in the Wild },
    YEAR = { 2010 },
    BOOKTITLE = { Proceedings of Graphics Interface (GI 2010) },
}