Page 357 -

12.4 Custom software 347

INSTRUMENTED SOFTWARE FOR HCI DATA COLLECTION
Instrumented software has been used to collect usage data in support of widely
used commercial products, research prototypes, and open-source tools. These
examples are representative of some of the possibilities.
Microsoft Office 2003
Microsoft's Customer Experience Improvement Program let users opt in to
having usage data collected anonymously. Data collected includes menu
selections, keyboard shortcuts, and artifacts of user customization, including the
number of mail folders and any modifications or customizations. This broad-
ranging data collection was open ended, rather than hypothesis driven: “In
short, we collect anything we think might be interesting and useful as long as it
doesn't compromise a user's privacy” (Harris, 2005).
The large data set (over 13 billion user sessions) provided substantial
insight that informed the redesign of the Office interface for the Office 2007
release (Harris, 2005). Even though the Paste command—the most popular,
with more than 11% of all command usage in Word—was frequently accessed
via shortcuts, the Paste button was the most frequently clicked button on the
toolbar. This led Microsoft's UI team to place the Paste button prominently in
the revised interface for Word (Harris, 2006).
This study also confirmed that Word users frequently use a small subset of
features while rarely using other features (McGrenere and Moore, 2000). The
top five commands in Word accounted for more than 32% of all command
usage, with frequencies declining quickly after the top 10 (Harris, 2006).
Personalized Versions of Application Interfaces
Noting the potential difficulties associated with complex interfaces for
desktop applications, McGrenere et al. set out to investigate the possible
utility of a simplified user interface containing only items selected by
the user. Using the scripting tools in Microsoft Word 2000, they built an
extension to Word that would allow users to work with this simplified
interface. Tools for adding items to their personalized interface were
included, along with a control that could be used to switch between the
simplified interface and the full interface as desired. In a field study with
20 users, this software was installed along with a logging tool for capturing
usage and a program that would upload usage logs to an Internet server.
Usage data collected included histograms of function usage frequency.
This data indicated that only a small number of commands were used very
frequently and that the users added almost all of those commands to their
personalized interfaces. A series of questionnaires indicated that users
preferred the personalized interfaces in terms of navigation and ease of
learning (McGrenere et al., 2002).

(Continued)