The Use of Iambic Pentameter in the

One of the leaders in grouping and user interface research is Thomas Tullis.
Tullis (1981) began by evaluating several types of user interface displays found in the
telecommunication industry. These displays were used to help operators make decisions
about what was wrong with particular telephone lines. Tullis presented displays in several
formats and tested the usability of each display type. Two of these interface display types
included narrative format, which contained unstructured text (see Figure 5A), and
structured format, which used grouping principles like common region and proximity to
organize the text into chunks (see Figure 5B). While Figure 5A appears to be moderately
grouped by proximity, it is far less organized than Figure 5B. Participants were presented
with both narrative and structured format display types and were asked to answer a series
of questions about each. In addition, participants were asked to rate the overall quality of
each display format on a scale of one to seven.
Figure 5. Narrative and structured format experimental interface
A
Note. Stimuli presented by Tullis (1981) (a) Narrative stimulus contains complete unstructured text. (b) Structured
stimulus contains text that is grouped by closure and proximity.
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B