Designing User Interfaces for Hypermedia PDF
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Research Reports ESPRIT Project 6532 . HI FI . Volume 1 Edited in cooperation with the European Commission w. Schuler J. Hannemann N. Streitz (Eds.) Designing User Interfaces for Hypermedia Springer Volume Editors Wolfgang Schuler Norbert Streitz Gesellschaft fOr Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung mbH Dolivostr. 15, 0-64293 Darmstadt, Germany Jorg Hannemann empirica GmbH Oxfordstr. 2, 0-53111 Bonn, Germany ESPRIT Project 6532, HIFI (Hypertext Interface for Information: Multimedia and Relational Databases), belongs to the Software and Advanced Information Processing sector of the ESPRIT Programme (European Specific Programme for Research and Development in Information Technologies) supported by the European Commission. The aim of ESPRIT Project 6532, HIFI, was to create a set of tools to allow a reader to access, via a hypertext interface, a large body of information managed by external (possibly pre-existing) databases, either relational or multimedia. Methodologies to support the hypertext interface development process are also being investigated. For three different real-life applications (for banks, hospitals and museums) prototypes have been developed and tested. The applications and the set of the HIFI tools have been fully specified and designed. Partners in the project were: Benaki Museum, Athens (Greece); Epsilon Software AG, Athens (Greece); GMD-IPSI, Darmstadt (Germany); Music/Forth, Chania (Greece); Politecnico di Milano, Milan (Italy); Siemens AG, Munich (Germany); Systems & Management SpA, Milan-Turin (Italy); Syntax Sistemi Software SpA, (Olivetti), Bari (Italy). ISBN-13: 978-3-540-58489-6 e-ISBN-13: 978-3-642-45743-2 001: 10.1007/978-3-642-45743-2 CIP-Data applied for. CR Subject Classification (1991): 1.7.2, H.5.1, H.1.2, J.1 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York Publication No. EUR 16105 EN of the European Commission, Dissemination of SCientific and Technical Knowledge Unit, Directorate-General Information Telecommunications, Information Market and Exploitation of Research, Luxembourg. © ECSC-EC-EAEC, Brussels-Luxembourg, 1995 LEGAL NOTICE Neither the European Commission nor any person acting on behalf of the Commission Is responsible for the use which might be made of the following information. Typesetting: Camera-ready by the editors SPIN: 10480846 45/3140-543210 - Printed on acid-free paper Preface One can observe that a wide range of human activities involves various forms of de sign. Especially if the goal implies the creation of an artifact, design is at the very center of these activities. It is the general understanding in the public to place design especially in the context of, for example, fashion, furniture, household items, cars, and architecture or in a more general way at the intersection of art and engineering. Of course, in the field of information technology, developers of software and hard ware are called system 'designers'. Design can be identified and considered in the context of many activities related to pUblishing: creating a product ad in a magazine, designing the layout of a newspaper, authoring a book. Summarizing these exam ples as 'creating documents', these are activities where two challenges with respect to design have to be met. Designing the content, its structure, and its relationship to the existing knowledge of potential readers is one, while the other refers to the 'rhetorical' aspects including designing the presentation of the material in order to communicate the content. Publishing is communicating knowledge. Once these documents take the form of electronic documents, the original chal lenges are extended by additional dimensions caused by the availability of new means for content creation, structuring, and presentation. The results of these activi ties in terms of interactive electronic documents exist only 'in' the computer - at least with respect to the full range of their functionality - and are 'read' via user-in terfaces created by special user-interface designers. Hypertext and hypermedia doc uments are prominent examples of these challenges. While the concept of "hyper text" with its emphasis on non-linearity provides new opportunities with respect to structuring the information, the rapid spread of multimedia technology allows also the creation and presentation of time-dependent data (e.g., audio and video) to be used as content thus going beyond text and pictures. These new opportunities and challenges with respect to structure and content characterize the design of Hyper media = Hypertext + Multimedia. The task of designing user-interfaces for hyper media is a crucial aspect of the creation of any but especially of large hypermedia applications in the real world. This is the topic of this book and reflected in the title: Designing User Intelfacesfor Hypermedia. While the design of user-interfaces for interactive computer systems in general is difficult because it is usually an ill-defined problem with specifications which are never sufficient, the design of large hypermedia applications is an especially com plex task. There are no design principles readily available which can be applied in a straight forward fashion. Due to the lack of a sufficient theoretical basis, a method- VI Preface ology for the design of hypertext and hypermedia has to be developed which can be used to guide the construction of specific hypermedia interfaces and applica tions. In order to address the above issues in a systematic way, we organized a Work shop on Methodological Issues on the Design of Hypertext-based User lnteifaces which was held at GMD-IPSI in Darmstadt, Germany, on July 13-14, 1993. This workshop was part of our contributions in the ESPRIT project 6532 HIFI (Hypertext Interface For Information: Multimedia and Relational Databases). Details on the HIFI project are described at the end of this book (see section 5). The call for con tributions to the workshop invited papers and participants to address the following topics: - Design and construction process of hypertext/hypermedia-based interfaces - Design proposals for the interface artefact - Evaluation concepts and methods for hypermedia user interfaces - Experiences with specific applications and practice reports. These topics were selected to discuss quite a range of questions. Examples are: Which framework for the hypermedia interface design process has been or should be used: theory or model-based approach, or a task-artefact cycle framework? Which specific design methods have been or should be used: argumentative design, design rationale method, participatory design, rapid prototyping, human acitivity approach, traditional requirements and constraints analysis, scenario building? Which are suggestive models for hypermedia user interfaces? What kind of meta phors are useful? How useful are handbooks and guidelines for 'traditional' user in terfaces? Which specific design decisions have improved the comprehensibility of hypermedia applications? In which way is it necessary to revise design decisions when an application grows larger and becomes more complex (scaling)? Which evaluation approaches have been or should be used? What are the specifics of eva luating the usability of hypermedia interfaces? Of course, the workshop did not pro vide definite answers to all these, in some cases very fundamental, questions. But that was not our expectation, either. Rather, the workshop proved to be a highly stim ulating and effective forum for the exchange of ideas and practical experiences, for the discussion, critique, and combination of proposals for concrete designs as well as for methodological considerations. Encouraged by the success of the workshop and the feedback, there was the feel ing that the results of this workshop should be disseminated to a larger audience out side the workshop participants. Although there were already proceedings distrib uted on site at the workshop - containing working papers of the talks, descriptions of projects, and system demonstrations - to publish a book on the workshop required substantial revisions and reorganization of the material. One important aspect was that the revised contributions should reflect also the discussion and feedback re ceived during the workshop. In addition, some contributions had to be regrouped according to the experience of new relationships discovered during the workshop. In order to achieve a high quality book, all authors were asked to reorganize, elabo rate, and.edit their initial contributions. These 'value-added' papers were again re viewed by the session chairs of the workshop. Based on this feedback, authors had to revise their papers a second time around before they were accepted for publica- Preface VII tion. In addition, each set of papers constituting one of the five sections of this book is introduced by general comments and a characterization of each paper pointing at the relationships of these papers. The new organization of the book resulted in five sections: I Foundations of Hypermedia Design 2 Metaphors for Hypermedia Interfaces 3 Evaluation and Critical Aspects of Hypermedia Design 4 Detailed Design Proposals and Guidelines 5 The ESPRIT Project HIFI. Looking at the final version of this book, we think that the result justifies the addi tional effort which everybody put into the revision process. We like to thank all con tributors for following the recommendations of the reviewers to a high degree, the reviewers for taking the time to comment and provide valuable feedback and recom mendations, the section editors for their thoughtful introductions and summaries of the papers providing a comprehensive perspective. In addition, we want to acknowl edge the patience and organizational support of Mrs. Ingeborg Mayer from Springer Verlag, Heidelberg and the technical support ofUwe Pechel from GMD-IPSI in pre paring the camera-ready copy. Finally, we hope that you, the readers, enjoy this book and have a chance to participate in this exchange of ideas and proposals. Darmstadt, October 1994 Wolfgang Schuler, Jorg Hannemann, Norbert Streitz Table of Contents 1 Foundations of Hypermedia Design 1 Introduction and Overview Norbert A. Streitz Hypennedia application design: a structured approach 5 Franca Garzotto, Luca Mainetti, Paolo Paolini Experiences in authoring hypennedia: creating better presentations 18 Lynda Hardman What matters in developing interfaces for hyperdocument presentation? 29 lorg Hannemann, Manfred ThUring Interaction in hypennedia systems: from browsing to conversation 43 Ulrich Thiel 2 Metaphors for Hypermedia Interfaces 55 Introduction and Overview 55 Ulrich Glowalla Metaphor engineering: a participatory approach 58 Matthias Rauterberg, Markus Hof Metaphor-based user interfaces for hyperspaces 68 Kaisa V iiiiniinen Architecture and user interface of the IDEAS intelligent 79 documentation system Andreas Birk, Bidjan Tschaitschian, Franz Schmalhofer, Manfred ThUring, Heiner Gertzen X Table of Contents 3 Evaluation and Critical Aspects of Hypermedia Design 95 Introduction and Overview 95 Manfred Thiiring An evaluation model based on experimental methods applied to the design of hypennedia user interfaces 99 Ulrich Glowalla, Joachim Hasebrook Never mind the theory, feel the data: Observations on the 117 methodological problems of user interface design Andrew Dillon, Cliff McKnight Design of hypennedia interfaces in commercial applications 126 Martin Hofmann, Ulrich Glowalla 4 Detailed Design Proposals and Guidelines 139 Introduction and Overview 139 Paul Kahn A dialogue approach to graphical infonnation access 141 Thomas Kamps, Klaus Reichenberger Annotations are not 'for free': The need for runtime layer support in hypertext engines 156 Christine M. Neuwirth, Ravinder Chandhok, David S. Kaufer, James H. Morris, Paul Erion, Dale ¥iller Three fundamental elements of visual rhetoric in hypertext 167 Paul Kahn, Ronnie Peters, George P. Landow Some issues of defining a user interface with general purpose 179 hypennedia toolkits Thomas Kirste Analysis of feature usage in access to on-line infonnation 201 TomT. Carey Facing technical documentation with hypertext: reflections on the 208 systematic design, construction and presentation Klaus Meusel, Klaus Eickemeyer, Thomas Koslowski Table of Contents XI 5 The ESPRIT Project HIFI 219 HIFI - Hypertext interface to external databases 219 Umberto Cavallaro The ESPRIT project HIFI medical application 225 Karin Hertwig HIFINBIPOP - Hypertext Interface to FINancial data in BIPOP bank (Italy) 236 Umberto Cavallaro, Marco Tentori Appendix: Addresses of the Authors 247
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