Um estudo sobre a aderência a recomendações de usabilidade em interfaces de linha de comando

Abstract

Notwithstanding the prevalence of graphical user interfaces (gui) among the general public, command-line interfaces (cli) continue to find extensive employment in academic and professional contexts, owing chiefly to their flexibility and expressive power. These advantages, however, are attended by difficulties of use and acquisition, particularly on the part of novice practitioners. Although specific recommendations concerning cli usability exist, most prominently those set forth in the Command Line Interface Guidelines (clig), it was deemed requisite to examine the extent to which they comport with general principles of usability, as embodied in the heuristics of Jakob Nielsen. An exploratory analysis of the guidelines, comprising a comparison with the heuristics and a corroborating questionnaire, confirmed the necessity of a more meticulous examination, subsequently effected through a second comparison of the two corpora of recommendations. In this inquiry, certain conceptual lacunæ were discerned in the guide; to attend to these, four additional guidelines were devised for incorporation into the clig.