Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!pyramid!cbmvax!snark!eric
From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: comp.cog-eng
Subject: Using kinesthetic memory for human interfaces
Summary: This suggests interesting things about how humans organize information
Message-ID: 
Date: 23 Jun 88 11:23:19 GMT
References: <3535@pdn.uucp>
Organization: Earth Station Avernus
Lines: 23

In article <3535@pdn.uucp>, colin@pdn.UUCP (Colin Kendall) writes:
>The experience has deepened my respect for muscular memory, and increased 
>my desire to try to incorporate "pie menus" into the product we are
>developing.  (With pie menus, the item chosen depends on the direction in 
>which the cursor is moved from some central point. Studies have shown that
>after a little practice, users of these menus no longer need to
>look at the screen while making menu selections, even complicated
>cascades of selections!) 

Very interesting. Of course pure kinesthetic memory involves less handling
of abstractions (less thinking) than the normal menu paradigm (in which you
are implicitly counting down or doing language processing each time). For most
people, even heavily visual types like me, it is even the case that it's less
effort than doing a color or texture match.

This suggests a more general question. What can we do (besides pie menus, which
I agree are neat) to maximize the extent to which the user's model of routine
operations is embedded in kinesthetic memory (NLP, anyone ;-)?).

-- 
      Eric S. Raymond                     (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
      UUCP: {{uunet,rutgers,ihnp4}!cbmvax,rutgers!vu-vlsi,att}!snark!eric
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