The Web is a very dynamic part of the Internet. Until now it is the medium with the greatest potential for efficient conveyance of thought; unfortunately, the majority of existing Web sites overcrowd the visual field and the short-term memory of users and use the helpful features of hypertext in a divergent way, prompting the user to skip from one topic to another instead of converging their attention on the ideas presented on specific pages. Also, there is no such thing as a Web "document". Someone was saying that the whole Web is a gigantic document. (thus it's hard to conceptualize its content and navigate it effectively)
- People need the separation of topics though, and they do it in many ways (one-file mammoths, TOCs and indexes in frames or dynamically rendered on each page, physical storage hierarchies, etc.)
- There are many problems with the Web, which mostly have to do with the lack of constraints in the medium, on both format and content, as well as the lack of good tools for automatically preserving context consistency. Like paper, DHTML allows works of Art and Science as well as baby scribbles.
Personalization (MonDoc)
(10min)
There's a lot of controversial talk in HCI circles about the need for and possibility of personalization. We all know about the fiasco of hurried implementation of "adaptive menus" in the Microsoft products. There are endless lines of "ergonomic" mice, keyboards and other devices which many times tend to get in the way more than help. I'll address the two points of view separately (cos mixing them up invites cogni-trouble.)
- Need for personalization CONs: user involvment, lack of standardization, confusion...
- Need for --"-- PROs: user control, expertise, efficiency...
- Possibility of --"-- CONs: context dependence, user differences, need for CONs...
- Possibility of --"-- PROs: digital automation, tracking habits and frequencies, user models...
- Solution for most CONs: real user control plus recursion (big hurray for fast prototyping- why keep it only in the design phase?? --
- Cynical answer: Because it's potentially dangerous financially to teach the users to make their own tools rather than selling them each tool, as special-purpose as possible
- Realist answer: Because users don't want to fiddle with the interface, but use the darn program).
The recursiveness implied in my extreme approach to document personalization has the side effect of blurring the borderline between a document and an application. As you'll see a lil'later, the principles of adaptive navigation and presentation can transform any document into a tool for collaboration. The modular structure principles can result in editors/tutors for any programming language (e.g ACT-R), or for computer-assisted learning (e.g. MoStaCon).