An Experimental Comparison of a Windowed vs a Non-Windowed Operating System Environment

Abstract

Despite the pervasiveness of window-management systems in the marketplace, little is known about how these systems affect the way computer users do their work. This paper describes the results of an experiment which compared user performance in a windowed vs a non-windowed operating environment. In this experiment, users performed tasks more accurately but slower in the windowed environment, indicating that there can be both positive and negative factors introduced by window-management systems.