First impressions of operating system styles affect usability

Abstract

The patterns of behaviour that people develop to work successfully with complex information technology are likely themselves to be complex. The beginning of interface style followed this train of thought in developing the Command Line Interface, complex to develop and complex in its use. However, in recent years’ information system interface design has become increasingly dominated by the use of Graphical User Interfaces, with the majority of systems relying on a Microsoft Windows based structure. This study attempts to find out how the two different interface styles, would affect how novice users use them when given a word processing task. The study was conducted using two interfaces based on a graphical style, and two command line type operating systems. The study examined how quickly the participants performed the task on the different interface styles, and used questionnaires to gather the quantitative findings. Preference versus performance was studied and the findings are consistent with what other researchers have found. The results indicate that better usability may not mean better performance.