METAMOUSE ON TRIAL: CONFESSIONS OF A WANTON TURTLE

Abstract

We conducted a usability study of Metamouse, a demonstrational interface to a graphics editor that infers complex constraints in a procedural paradigm using graphical construction. Aspects of its inference mechanism and metaphor were tested by having a variety of users perform standard tasks with and without its assistance. We found that people learn to use static rather than dynamic constructions, and the system fails to learn some task decompositions. In particular, its rules for inferring iteration over a set of objects are both inadequate and inadequately disclosed by the metaphor. To address the problem, we propose an explicit representation of sets and generalization over multiple examples.