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. -- Gary Perlman Wang Institute Tyngsboro, MA 01879 (617) 649-9731 UUCP: decvax!wanginst!perlman CSNET: perlman@wanginst