The Σ- concept

1 April 1983

journal article
Published by Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in ACM SIGCHI Bulletin

Vol. 14 (4) , 8-15
https://doi.org/10.1145/1044188.1044190

Abstract

The "User's Conceptual Model" (UCM) plays an important role in determining the behaviour of a user at the user-computer interface. In this paper I consider a small well-defined group of users of computer systems - those who know some general-purpose programming language. Such users have a conceptual model of their own (favourite) "programming language as a problem-solving tool". Using the problem to compute the inner product of two vectors in E ⁿ as a starting point, I develop that which I have called the Σ- concept and show how it fits into a formal model of the UCM of the "programming language as a problem-solving tool".

Keywords

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