Designing user interfaces for hypermedia

Directorate-General For The Information Society And Media

Description

Information technology and telecommunications

Sujets

• Information access
• Science and Technology Policy Research
• Research program
• Informatique
• Marketing et communication

Informations

• Publié par: DIRECTORATE-GENERAL-FOR-THE-INFORMATION-SOCIETY-AND-MEDIA
• Nombre de lectures: 26
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Research Reports
ESPRIT
Project 6532 · HIFI · Volume 1
W. Schuier J. Hannemann N. Streitz (Eds.)
Designing
User Interfaces
for Hypermedia
XIII-D-2
JMO B4/81
EDITION PRIVEE: SPRINGER VERLAG
CDNA16105ENC
EUR 16105 EN
fp Springer Research Reports ESPRIT
Project 6532 - HIFI · 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 für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung mbH
Dolivostr. 15, D-64293 Darmstadt, Germany
Jörg Hannemann
empirica GmbH
Oxfordstr. 2, D-53111 Bonn, Germany
ESPRIT Project 6532, HIFI (Hypertext Interfacefor 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).
CIP-Data applied for.
CR Subject Classification (1991): I.7.2, H.5.1, H.1.2, J.1
ISBN 3-540-58489-7 Springer-Verlág Berlin Heidelberg New York
Publication No. EUR 16105 EfJ 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
Printed in Germany
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 Interfaces for 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 Interfaces
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
-n 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 V