If you go to the book The network Nation, hiltz and turoff in 1978 it has the original eies menus.  The book was reprinted by mit press in 1993 and you can still get it from amazon.

 

Menus were used largely with the tty interface that was the only thing available in general in those early days.  however, they could be very efficient if done right.

 

In our system we allowed users to answer questions ahead so if they had learned what the sequence of questions is that they had to answer to do something they could type answers ahead separated by commas so that all of  them were done in one operation.  If you put in a ? in a sequence of questions you could have the system stop in the sequence and get an answer.

Finally, if instead of putting in a menu choice you put in a command +command it would execute that command.  One important command was +store (name=question sequence) so that you could create your own commands to do sequences you are always doing.

 

A map of the relationships of the menus was what most people used to learn the system and then when they found out what they would do most often they could create their own command structure for more experienced interactions among those who became frequent users of the systems.

 

This approach can still work in todays screen oriented system and in many cases would be ideal for more complex systems with many alternatives.  EIES and EMISARI (the 1971 emergency management system designed in the u.s. government for emergencies like the wage price freeze were not simple systems.  They had many group communication features still waiting to be rediscovered in the new social media systems.  If you want the full manuals for EIES and EMISARI

they are stored on a collection of early reports on the NJIT library system.

http://library.njit.edu/archives/cccc-materials/index.php

it is a library special collection.

In hte EIES system we could design special interlaces for groups.  You might check out the manual on the TOPICS system which those with group communication systems have still to discover how useful that sort of system can be.

The very first group ware system i designed has a map structure given in the article that follows and includes the complete discussion with a very good group of computing professionals (Herb Grosch, Ruth Davis, and many other well known professionals).  It was a delphi conference with anonymous voting.) .  The discussion and voting was about future applications of the type of system they were using.  It makes very interesting historical insights.

Turoff, Murray, (1970) Delphi Conferencing: Computer Based Conferencing with Anonymity, Journal of Technological Forecasting and Social Change 3(2), 1970, 159-204.

 

The map of menus in a complex system is great tool for newcomers that should be designed for any system-especially a game and especially for letting advanced users to tailor their own commands.  feel free to reference any of my comments and you can reference the historical documents on EIES and EMISARI where this was all done for real time large group communication systems long before the current generation of social media systems.   also feel free to ask roxanne or me further questions.

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please send messages to murray.turoff@gmail.com  do not use @njit.edu address

 

Distinguished Professor Emeritus

Information Systems, NJIT

homepage: http://is.njit.edu/turoff