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57.
in the same context, then context is sufficient to remove the
ambiguity. There is no reason to believe that users will have
difficulty with such abbreviations.
(b) Another possibility is to interrogate the user when an ambiguous
command is entered. This is not the optimal solution because it
increases command entry time and may be impractical in some
situations.
(c) One of the words being abbreviated may be changed if point (a) is
not sufficient.
(d)
If none of the above points work then it may be necessary to
generate abbreviations that violate the truncation rule (Noses and
Ehrenreich, 1981). However, given the literature on the improved
recall of a single distinctive item embedded in a serial list (the
von Restorff effect) one might expect a small number of such
deviant abbreviations to be remembered because of their uniqueness.
Streeter et al suggested that the lengths of the truncated abbreviations
should be the minimum to achieve uniqueness. The user should be told
the minimum number of letters to distinguish all command names, and also
told that fewer letters will often suffice.