Computer Aids for VLSI Design

Steven M. Rubin

Copyright © 1994

Chapter 10: Human Engineering

Section 6 of 6

10.6 Summary

Human engineering comprises both the innermost and the outermost levels of a good computer system. At the deepest level is the task and user model that permeates the system design to correspond with the user's abilities and expectations. At the top level is a sheen of friendliness and cleverness that comforts the user by interacting intelligently. Between these are the many other system functions that constitute a VLSI CAD system.

Questions

1. What is wrong with a system containing the commands "transform" and "transpose"?
2. Why should the display be organized to position commonly used areas close together?
3. What are the relative merits of marching menus and pop-up menus?
4. What problems will be encountered when single keystrokes are used as abbreviations for full commands?
5. Which will better reduce menu selection time: increasing the size of the menu or decreasing the distance of the menu entry from the cursor?
6. What database organization guarantees that keystroke playback of a previous session will work correctly?
7. Why do advanced users prefer less feedback?

References

• Applicon, Bravo3 User's Guide, Applicon Incorporated, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1986.
• Bobrow, Daniel G.; Burchfiel, Jerry D.; Murphy, Daniel L.; and Tomlinson, Raymond S., "TENEX: A Paged Time Sharing system for the PDP-10," CACM, 15:3 135-143, March 1972.
• Card, Stuart K.; Moran, Thomas P.; and Newell, Allen, The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, New Jersey, 1983.
• Curry, James E., "A Tablet Input Facility for an Interactive Graphics System," Proceedings IJCAI '69, 33-40, May 1969.
• Digital, PDP10 Timesharing Handbook, Digital Press, Maynard, Massachusetts, 1970.
• Fairbairn, D. G. and Rowson, J. A., "ICARUS: An Interactive Integrated Circuit Layout Program," Proceedings 15th Design Automation Conference, 188-192, June 1978.
• Gosling, James, personal communications.
• Haber, Ralph Norman, "How We Remember What We See," Scientific American, 222:5, 104-112, May 1970.
• Newman, William M. and Sproull, Robert F., Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics, 2nd Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1979.
• Ousterhout, J. K., "Caesar: An Interactive Editor for VLSI Layouts," VLSI Design, II:4, 34-38, 1981.
• Ritchie, D. M. and Thompson, K., "The UNIX Time-Sharing System," Bell Systems Technical Journal, 57:6, 1905-1929, 1978.
• Stallman, Richard M., "The Extensible, Customizable Self-Documenting Display Editor," Proceedings ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symposium on Text Manipulation, Portland Oregon, 147-156, June 1981.
• Thornton, Robert W., "The Number Wheel: A Tablet Based Valuator for Interactive Three-Dimensional Positioning," Computer Graphics, 13:2, 102-107, August 1979.
• Tilbrook, David M., A Newspaper Pagination System, Masters Thesis, University of Toronto Department of Computer Science, 1976.
• Varner, Denise, "Color Avionics," unpublished manuscript.

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Steven M. Rubin

Electric Editor, Inc.