From: Howard Gutowitz (CEO, Eatoni Ergonomics, Inc.) <hag@eatoni.com>
> Christian writes:
> | I read about a company that does something similar [...]
> | Type in "t" and a list of words with beginning with t pop up,
> | ordered by either frequency in the English language or frequency [...]
>
> The idea of predictive text entry of the sort "just press the first letter
> or so and the word pops up" comes up often in the field. It sounds
> so seductive, but it doesn't work. Meaning, it ends up being much
> more work for the user, much more mental anguish, and, finally,
> much slower, than just entering the word directly. [caveat snipped]
>
> http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/~mdd/research/publications/00dunlopcrossan.html
> www.eatoni.com
The point of this paper seems to be: "it doesn't matter if something
is 'better' by some measure if it just drives people crazy in the
process." If writing is redirected speech, a predictive interface is
like talking with some nitwit who's always interrupting you with
what he *thinks* you're about to say. It will hardly matter if he's
right 80% of the time, is saintly in his intentions, and that con-
versations of equivalent meaning are shorter.
And the orthography of c-print, being inherently less redundant, would
be harder to predict anyway. I see the main benefit being
fewer characters to enter. A secondary benefit might be fewer
keypresses per character. (E.g., within "GHI", you'd rotate through
letter choices in absolute frequency order within c-print as a whole,
a slight reordering you could probably train pretty quickly.)
To me, a nice interface for something like c-print
would allow me to thumbtype in an unabbreviated word and,
upon hitting the first following space/punctuation mark, briefly
highlight only those characters that I *needed* to enter
next time.
(It might also, on a status line, echo the full spelling of the
abbreviations I used, as a check. But I'd like to be
able to turn that off easily.)
On the reading side, I'd like to be able to move around
on the message from word to word, and see the
status-line display for the full spelling.
But maybe that's just me.
-michael turner
leap@gol.com
Received on Fri Dec 21 06:34:45 2001