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HONS 04/12

Improving Users' Command Selection Performance

Joel Harrison
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
University of Canterbury

Abstract

Hotkeys have been shown to improve user command selection performance through proving a flat selection hierarchy and fast activation through the keyboard. However, hotkeys are often not learn ed by users even though command selection performance improvements are possible . Part of the hotkey learning problem is the current hotkey feedback methods which require the user to acquire the command with the mouse in order to display. In this paper we present ExposeHK, a new interface technique which allows the user to browse, perform and learn hotkeys from within the hotkey modality. ExposeHK encourages users to learn hotkeys through practice thereby providing a seamless transition from novice to exper t performance. Our evaluations demonstrate that with ExposeHK users are able to achieve a significantly higher level of command selection performance. Furthermore, our final evaluation demonstrates that when ExposeHK is available in an application users’ hotkey usage is extremely high.