Much of interface design is still done by hand without recourse to known HCI theory. A more proper approach is to incorporate theory in design tools. As a step toward remedying this, we have created a simple tool incorporating several known psychological results (e.g., the keystroke model). The tool, extensions to a spreadsheet explicitly developed for manipulating psychology data, helps create theoretically motivated aliases for command line interfaces. It was used to semi-automatically generate a set of aliases for the command line interface of a cognitive modelling system. These aliases reduce typing time by approximately 50%. Frequency data can be difficult to obtain (we estimate that at least 200 hours of subject data appear to be necessary to get a useful distribution in this case). We found that expert users can quickly provide useful and reasonably consistent estimates, and that the time savings predictions were robust across their predictions and when compared with a uniform command frequency distribution.
[Appeared as : Nichols, S., & Ritter, F. E. (1995). A theoretically motivated tool for automatically generating command aliases. Proceedings of Chi '95. 393-400]