Electronic book production is a developing field which is still in its infancy. As such, there is still relatively little material available in the form of design principles or guidelines for the production of such books. It is also extremely complex, in that electronic book designers can take advantage of a number of delivery techniques which are not available to authors of traditional paper-based books. Such techniques include: multimedia (the delivery of text, pictures, sound, and moving pictures); and hypermedia (the linking of reactive information items to form non-linear structures). This research investigates some of the key issues in the design of end-user interfaces to electronic books. Essentially, this centres on three basic problems: the use of metaphors in the design of interfaces to electronic books; models for the design of multimedia pages; and the provision of various knowledge corpus structures. Interface metaphors are investigated through the implementation and evaluation of the book metaphor. Applications were developed which either embedded or did not embed the book metaphor. Subjects used these applications while undertaking a number of information access tasks. Both qualitative and performance data werecollected and some significant results were obtained. Five page models were developed (referred to as: simple; tiled; overlay; oversize; and dynamic) which were used to design a number of page structures. These page structures were evaluated using qualitative measures of user reactions to the various page structures. Seven interface dimensions were measured and again significant results were obtained. To measure the effects of knowledge corpus structure on the design of electronic books three different book structures were created: linear; tree; and network. These were investigated in the light of some common information access tasks. The results indicated that some knowledge corpus structures were more appropriate for certain types of task.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:358404 |
| Date | January 1994 |
| Creators | Richards, Stephen M. |
| Publisher | Teesside University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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