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The art of navigating through hypertext

Published: 01 March 1990 Publication History

Abstract

Hypertext (3), (19), (25) is becoming a popular approach to many computer applications, especially those dealing with the on-line presentation of large amounts of loosely structured information such as on-line documentation or computer-aided learning. There are still many issues concerning hypertext that remain to be resolved, however, many of which are in the user interface area. One of the major usability problems with hypertext is the user's risk of disorientation while navigating the information space. For example, our studies [23] showed that 56 percent of the readers of a document written in one of the most popular commercial hypertext systems agreed fully or partly with the statement I was often confused about ‘where I was. ’
To investigate a number of user interface options in hypertext systems we designed a prototype system in the form of a hypertext report on events at the 1987 hypertext workshop. This system was implemented on an Apple Macintosh with Hypercard as the programming system. (To get a feel for our hypertext system, the reader is encouraged to review Figures 1 to 10 which contain screen dumps of a session with the system and thus constitute a kind of printed demonstration or guided tour.) Hypertext is a very dynamic form of human-computer interaction and can only be fully appreciated in an interactive environment. However, even these figures give a much better understanding of the system than a traditional textual description could give.

References

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Bernstein, M. The bookmark and the compass: Orientation tools for hypertext users. ACM ?;IGOIS Bulletin 9, 4 (Oct. 1988), 34-45.
[3]
Conklin. J. Hypertext: An introduction and survey. IEEE Computer 20. 9 (Sept. 1987), 17-41.
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Egan, D.E., Remde, J.R., Landauer, T.K., Lochbaum, C.C., and Gomez, L.M. Acquiring information in books and SuperBooks. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Assoc. (San Francisco, March 27-30, 1989).
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Egan, D.E., Remde, J.R., Gomez, L.M., Landauer, T.K., Eberhardt, J., and Lochbaum, C.C. Formative design-evaluation of "quperBook." ACM Trans. Information Systems 7, 1 {Jan. 1989), 30-57.
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Feiner, S. Seeing the forest for the trees: Hierarchical display of hypertext struclures. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Office Information Systems (Palo Alto, Calif., March 23-25, 1988), pp. 205-212.
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Frisse, M.E. Searching for information in a hypertext nledical handbook. Commun. ACM 31, 7 (July 1988}, 880-886.
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Nielsen, J. Hypertext and Hypermedia, Academic Press, San Diego, Calif., 1990. pertext programming system. In Proceedings of the NordDATA '89 Joint Scandinavian Computer Conference (Copenhagen, Denmark, June 19-22, 1989), pp. 485-490.
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Nielsen, J. Prototyping user interfaces using an object-oriented bypertext programming system. In Proceedings of the NordDATA '89 Joint Scandinavian Computer Conference (Copenhagen, Denmark, June 19-22,1989), pp. 485-490.
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Nielsen, J. Usability engineering at a discount. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCI International '89 (Boston, Mass., Sept. 18-22, 1989).
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Nielsen, j. The matters that really matter for hypertext usability, in Proceedings of the ACM Hypertext '89 Conference (Pittsburgh, Penn., Nov. 5-8, 1989), pp. 2:t9-248.
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Norman, D.A. The Psychology of Everyday Things, Basic Books, N.Y., N.Y., 1988.
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Smith, J.B., and Weiss. S.F. An overview of hypertext (introduction to special issue on hypertext). Comrnun. ACM 31, 7 (July 1988), 816- 819.
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Yankeiovich, N., Smith, K.E., Garrett, N., and Meyrowitz, N. Issues in designing a hyperrnedia document system: The Intermedia case study. In S. Ambron, and K. Hooper, eds., Interactive Multimedia: Visions of Multimedia for Developers, Educators, & In}ormation Providers, Microsoft Press, Redmond, Wash., 1988, 33-85.

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Published In

cover image Communications of the ACM
Communications of the ACM  Volume 33, Issue 3
March 1990
100 pages
ISSN:0001-0782
EISSN:1557-7317
DOI:10.1145/77481
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 March 1990
Published in CACM Volume 33, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Context
  2. HyperCard
  3. hypermedia
  4. interaction history
  5. user navigation

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  • (2023)Va.Si.Li-Lab as a collaborative multi-user annotation tool in virtual reality and its potential fields of applicationProceedings of the 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media10.1145/3603163.3609076(1-9)Online publication date: 4-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Usability and User Experience Related Perceptions of University Students Regarding the Use of Bing Chat Search Engine and AI Chatbot: Preliminary Evaluation of Assessment Scales2023 IEEE 21st Jubilee International Symposium on Intelligent Systems and Informatics (SISY)10.1109/SISY60376.2023.10417910(000607-000612)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2023
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