The design and evaluation of online help for Unix EMACS: capturing the user in menu design

The card-sort technique and cluster analysis were used for determining an effective organization for a help menu in Unix EMACS. Similarity data were gathered for with a card-sorting task using EMACS commands, and a hierarchical cluster analysis of the data was performed. The results indicate that differences among novices, intermediates, and experts appear with computer-based concepts such as windows and buffers, but that the sorts are more similar than they are different. It is argued that cluster analysis may aid designers in determining a functional organization, but that in the domain of this study, this organization may not help users bridge the mapping from real world tasks to computer tasks