Flying through hypertext
Patrick Lai, Udi Manber · 1991
Hypertext systems provide links between different pieces of information (text, figures, pictures, etc.) so that the reader can follow many different paths corresponding to lines of thoughts, levels of description, levels of details, and so on.One of the main problems in using hypertext systems is the navigation problem ~i90a].Users tend to get lost partly because the information they are reading can have a complicated structure which is usually unknown to them.We study in this paper a technique to help users orient themselves by a quick browsing, which we callfiying, through hypertext.The first thing many people do when given a new book is flip through the pages to get a first impression of the book.Quite a bit of information can be gained by this quick informal evaluation.First, just the size of the book is a good indicator.A ten-page brochure is treated differently than a 500-page instruction manual.The book's density (how many characters per page), its layout (e.g., the font, the percentage of pictures), the technical content (e.g., number of equations, number of technical drawings), familiar features (e.g., pictures or drawings that the reader has seen elsewhere), just to name a few simple things that can be determined quickly, all give us important information about the book without reading even one sentence.This kind of information is not immediately available in hypertext, and we believe that the lack of it contributes to the navigation problem.We would like to provide this type of information in a quick and flexible way.We describe in this paper a tool for flying through hypertext systems and discuss the issues involved in its implementation.Our tool is analogous to flipping the pages of a book with one notable exception: the flipping is not necessarily in a linear order.The availability of the links and the structure that they provide enable flexible flipping in many different orders controlled by the reader.The key to any flipping is speed.The goal is not to digest the contents of the pages, but rather to gain some insight to features such as organization, size, depth, level, detail, and so on.Another analogy is to seeing a movie, or better yet a videodisk, in fast forward.There are certain characteristics of the movie that can be studied better that way.Flying can also be used to move fast from one place to another in the hypertext following a certain order of traversal.Flying is not intended to replace any of the other navigation tools; it is an additional tool.