An Ease of Use Evaluation of an Integrated Editor and Formatter

Abstract

Etude is an integrated text editor and formatter that was designed to be easy to learn and easy to use. To measure Etude's success in meeting these goals, twenty-one computer-naive temporary office workers were taught to use Etude in a controlled experiment. Ninety percent of the subjects were able to create and edit letters after a training period of less than two hours and twenty minutes, though they were not able to perform these tasks as quickly as they could when using a typewriter.