TASK-BASED METHOD FOR CREATING USABLE HYPERTEXT

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