perlman@wanginst.EDU (Gary Perlman) (07/31/87)
The following is an abstract for a report I just completed.
It will be available as Wang Institute report TR-87-09.
If you want a copy of the report, send me your postal address.
An Overview of SAM:
A Hypertext Interface to Smith & Mosier's
Guidelines for Designing User Interface Software
(Wang Institute Technical Report TR-87-09)
Gary Perlman
Wang Institute
Tyngsboro, MA 01879 USA
The Smith/Mosier Guidelines report is the most comprehensive single
source of information for user interface designers. The Guidelines
report is a 500 page text used as an information source, as a guide for
user interface design, and as a checklist for evaluating user
interfaces. The Guidelines have a rich structure with a deep hierarchy
supplemented by hundreds of references to outside sources and hundreds
of internal cross-references. A large reference text with rich
structure with prototypical uses is an excellent candidate for hypertext
methods. SAM is a hypertext interface to the Guidelines. It features a
multiple workspace-window environment in which each window is a task
specialist. The windows allow hierarchical browsing, gathering pieces
of information by importance or by order of use, following
cross-references, and the use of an inverted index and reference list.
In this overview, I summarize the main features of SAM, give some
examples of its use, discuss its empirical evaluation plan, and discuss
lessons learned during its development. I discuss the need for
pre-processing large databases and its tradeoffs with the need for being
able to dynamically parse and process structural information. I also
discuss the tradeoffs of developing a specialized system for a specific
text, and how the system can be generalized. Finally, I discuss lessons
learned about managing many workspaces for browsing and constructing
reports.
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Gary Perlman Wang Institute Tyngsboro, MA 01879 (617) 649-9731
UUCP: decvax!wanginst!perlman CSNET: perlman@wanginst