Text Editing Performance with Partial and Full Page Displays

Full page text editor displays have been favorably contrasted with partial page displays with respect to potential user productivity. An experiment was conducted in which 20 subjects used both partial and full page displays driven by the same computer text editing system. The subjects completed 384 editing tasks using each display. Each task required subjects to make a revision which was marked on a printed copy of a document. The results showed no practical productivity difference between the two displays for typical editing revisions after a moderate amount of practice.