Characterizing large-scale use of a direct manipulation application in the wild

Examining large-scale, long-term application use is critical to understanding the degree to which an application meets the needs of its user community. However, there has been limited published analysis of this type of data, none of which pertains to applications that support creating and modifying content using direct manipulation. In this paper, we present an analysis of 2 years of usage data from an instrumented version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program, including data from over 200 users. In the course of our analysis, we contribute to the body of knowledge on large-scale application use in three ways. First, we show that previous findings concerning the sparseness of command use and idiosyncrasy of users’ command vocabularies extend to a new domain and interaction style. Second, we demonstrate that direct manipulation applications require new analysis methods to determine command popularity. Finally, we describe the novel application of a clustering technique to characterize users’ higher-level tasks. Author