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ultimately enhance interface performance. Beginning users, however, could use a sort of help box, because the metaphor is not always going to be clear enough for them to understand, no matter how much effort its programmers devote to making it resemble something the users understand. Experts, on the other hand, understand what is going on with the technical aspects of an interface metaphor. They know what they want to do and they know how to do it—and so they design shortcuts to facilitate achieving their goals.
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visuals, actions and procedures that exploit specific knowledge that users already have of other domains. The purpose of the interface metaphor is to give the user instantaneous knowledge about how to interact with the user interface. They are designed to be similar to physical entities but also have
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While the concept behind interface metaphors appears simple (to promote more efficient facilitation of a computer), a lack of empirical evidence exists to support these claims. Little research has actually been completed that demonstrates the benefits of implementing metaphors in computer systems as
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Software designers attempt to make computer applications easier to use for both novice and expert users by creating concrete metaphors that resemble the users' real-world experiences. Continual technological improvement has made metaphors depict these real-world experiences more realistically to
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which bore a striking resemblance to both
Macintosh, and to the Alto's interface. Windows eventually overtook Apple in the PC market to become the predominant GUI-based operating system.
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In the mid-twentieth century, computers were extremely rare and used only by specialists. They were equipped with complicated interfaces comprehensible only to these select few. In 1968,
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385:(1988), Interface Metaphors and User Interface Design, in M. Helander (ed.), "Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction", Elsevier Science, pp. 67–85.
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Vaananen K. and J. Schmidt (1994). "User
Interface for Hypermedia: How to Find Good Metaphors?". In Proceedings of CHI'94. Boston, April 1994.
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Richards, S. M., et al. (1994) "The Use of
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familiar knowledge to help them understand 'the unfamiliar', and placed in the terms so the user may better understand.
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Exploring
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The graphical user interface. Time for a paradigm shift?
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gave a demonstration which astonished executives at
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357:"A History of the GUI-Other GUIs during the 1980s"
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288:"A History of the GUI-Introduction"
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