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Although large hypertext documentation systems have many benefits in the commercial world, they can be difficult to build and use. To help overcome both these obstacles, a method under development at Hewlett-Packard assists authors in creating usable hypertext. A Wizard of Oz experiment was done with traditional on-line documentation and hypertext documentation to see what users liked and disliked. The experiment showed the need for a set of hypertext construction rules to ensure usability. Following these rules, and with computer assistance, authors are expected to do a task analysis of users' activities, to identify critical objects and create content nodes for them, to create links between nodes within clearly defined and cognitively justified limits, and to conduct usability tests on the resulting hypertext volume. Whilst this method recognises the importance of good clear writing, the rules and suggested prectices are not primarily about writing or screen design, but about creating a coherent navigational web that ensures success among commercial users of hypertext. The authoring system described in this paper has been developed for the HP Help system, which has been adopted as the common help delivery system for developers of Common Open Systems Environments on Unix-like platforms. |
