In an effort to understand the impact of designing for digital genres on usersâ mental representations of structure, a two-phase study was conducted. In phase 1, six expert news readers and a panel of HCI experts were solicited for input regarding genre-conforming and genre-violating web news page design, navigation, and story categorization. In phase 2, a longitudinal experiment with a group of 25 novice web news readers who were exposed to one of the two designs over 5 sessions is reported. During these sessions a variety of user data were captured, including: comprehension (recall, recognition), usability (time on task, accuracy, user satisfaction), and navigation (path length, category node hits). The between-group difference of web site design was signiï¬ cant for comprehension, usability, and navigation with the users of the genre-conforming design demonstrating better performance. The within-group difference of time was signiï¬ cant across these three measures as well, with performance improving over time. No interaction effect was found between web site design and time on comprehension or usability. However, a surprising interaction effect was found on navigation; speciï¬ cally the breadth of navigation (i.e. the number of nodes visited for two classes of tasks) increased over time more dramatically for the genre-violating group than for the genre-conforming group. By examining the changes in these data over time and between the two designs, evidence for the development of usersâ mental representations of structure was captured.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and Maynard, S. (1995) Don't forget to put the cat out! Why collaborative hypermedia and everyday writing pass one another by. The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia: Applications and Research, 1, 135-153. Abstract: Hypermedia technology is seen as offering potentially innovative support for the process of writing as much as information access and reading. However, authoring enviroments to date have had little impact in the realâ world production of text. One possible reason is our poor conceptualisation of current writing practice. In the present paper, 31 adult writers kept diaries of their writing activities over the course of one week. The results indicate that for most pople, real world writing is a short communicative act aimed at a limited audience and that technological support for such writing is less likely to resemble a hypermedia workstation than a portable personal communication device. Implications for work in the design of authoring tools are developed.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and McKnight, C. (1995) Never mind the theory, feel the data: Observations on the design of Hypertext-based User Interfaces, In W. Schuler, J. Hannemann and N. Streitz (eds.) Designing User Interfaces for Hypermedia, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 117-125. Introduction: In the present paper we will seek to place the design of hypermedia-based user interfaces in the appropriate context of user-centred system design. In so doing we will outline what we believe to be the major methodological issues. As this will indicate, we view hypermedia design as essentially no different from any other kind interface design in terms of process and problem. Hence the methodological issues for hypermedia interfaces need to be seen as design problems rather than cognitive scientific ones. In this vein, we argue for a data-driven approach to design that seeks theoretical insight at the methodological and process level of design rather than the user level.

Task has been recognized as an influential factor in information seeking behavior. An increasing number of studies are concentrating on the specific characteristics of the task as independent variables to explain associated information-seeking activities. This paper examines the relationships between operational measures of information search behavior, subjectively perceived post-task difficulty and objective task complexity in the context of factual information-seeking tasks on the web. A questiondriven, web-based information-finding study was conducted in a controlled experimental setting. The study participants performed nine search tasks of varying complexity. Subjective task difficulty was found to be correlated with many measures that characterize the searcherâ s activities. Four of those measures, the number of the unique web pages visited, the time spent on each page, the degree of deviation from the optimal path and the degree of the navigation pathâ s linearity, were found to be good predictors of subjective task difficulty. Objective task complexity was found to affect the relative importance of those predictors and to affect subjective assessment of task difficulty.

Nowadays, weblogs or blogs are important tools for personal or workgroup websites publication. These tools give the necessary performances to create, edit, evaluate, publish and file digital contents, in the framework of a standarized workflow, and for managing the digital information life cycle. Nevertheless, these tools must be complemented with existence of technical funcionalities necessary to get a correct implantation and use. The aim of the work is to assess the way in which weblogs implement the technical solutions necessary to utilize correctly classification tools. The evaluation took into account let to extract a collection of conclusions of great interest to analize the state of art of the content classification tools integration and the weblogs management systems. As a general conclusion, it can be assured that the current generation of weblogs management systems do not offer all the desired performances for the classical classification tools, offering also a very heterogeneous scene.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Richardson, J., Dillon, A., and McKnight, C. (1989) The effect of window size on reading and manipulating electronic text. In E. Megaw (ed.) Contemporary Ergonomics 1989. London:Taylor and Francis, 474-479. Abstract: With the advent of hypertext the presentation of electronic text is becoming an increasingly important issue. However, most research to date has focused on simplistic measures of reading speed or navigation in highly controlled presentation formats, often using very constrained texts and task scenarios. The present paper attempts a more meaningful analysis of the effect of window size on reader comprehension and manipulation of real-world texts. Reading a journal article for comprehension and a software manual for specific information are both investigated. Results indicate that screen size is not a major factor in performance on either task but readers express a strong preference for larger screens.

This paper revises different tools developed to manage digital information resources. First, it revises relations between information management and content management. Second, the paper analyses content management software componentes. Last, it proposes a practical classification of the tools.