Operational Complexity of Direct Manipulation Tasks in a Windows Environment

<body> <table width="100%"> <tr> <td align="center"> This page requires frames. <a href="http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/viewArticle/402">Click here</a> for the non-frames version. <p>Non-frames version <a href="http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/viewArticle/402">available</a>.</p> </td> </tr> </table> <h1>Operational Complexity of Direct Manipulation Tasks in a Windows Environment</h1> <h2><i>John Maltby</i></h2> <h3>Australasian Journal of Information Systems</h3> <h4>Abstract</h4> <div>A method to quantify operational complexity of direct manipulation tasks in a windows environment is discussed. The method utilises a formula from communication theory due to Shannon and Weaver which describes the uncertainty H(p\,p2,...pn) in outcome of an event which is the result of a Markov process where the individual events have probabilities of occurrence Pi,p2,-Pn- A taxonomy of basic windows operations is developed for Microsoft Windows and used to show that a windows dialogue can also be described as a Markov process. The H formula is then applied to determine the total complexity of a sequence of basic windows operations and thus provide some measure of the complexity of a given task as seen by the user. An estimate of the total entropy of a Microsoft Windows language source is obtained, indicating that the redundancy of windows dialogue is about 28%.</div> </body>