Yes, and one of my favorites to use in teaching is "The Art of the Obvious" (Lind, Johnson & Sandblad, CHI 1992).
While it is largely concerned with "automatically processed components of the task of reading frequently used documents", the authors contend that their findings suggest "implications for task analysis and interface design". Specifically, they (and others) have posited that one of the very few visual attributes that humans always automatically (without additional conscious processing or thought) register is location. Thus, scrolling buttons = requires higher-level brain function and this does not making using an interface analogous to the eventual functional automaticity of, say, driving a car. Fascinating read; if anyone's interested, I can email you the PDF. Basically, their experimental design was to take hospital and other medical charts, remove the higher-level data (numbers and specific letters) and replace them all with XXXs in an emergency room context to see if/how the doctors could still roughly review the "information" for rapid diagnoses ... and... they could because they were familiar with the layout of the various forms and knew what the presence (or absence) of those XXXs in specific locations could signify. Judy On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Thomas McGrath III wrote: > I agree. It is not good moving buttons in fields or groups. It makes it > too hard for users to develop a motor plan for those buttons. A motor > plan is what happens during touch typing or even during walking where > our muscles develop a plan to those activities without having to think > about it. > <snip> > There have been hundreds of papers and years of research done on this. _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
