THE EMERGENCE OF HYPERTEXT AND PROBLEM-SOLVING - AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF ACCESSING AND USING INFORMATION FROM LINEAR VERSUS NONLINEAR-SYSTEMS

Past research suggests that problem solving and/or decision behavior c an be altered and improved by the changes in the way information is ac cessed and displayed. Also, researchers have found that the usefulness of different information display formats are contingent on the charac teristics of the problem task. This research investigated the impact o n problem solving when accessing and using information from linear and nonlinear systems. Also, the research investigated problem-solving pe rformance of linear and nonlinear systems when applied to different co mbinations of problem tasks. In a laboratory setting, linear and nonli near systems were developed to conduct this experiment. This experimen t used 64 graduate business students in a two-factor repeated-measures design employing a multivariate analysis of variance to analyze the d ata. Repeated measures were conducted to analyze the experimental grou p under both linear and nonlinear treatments. The findings from the st udy support the notion that the nonlinear system resulted in superior problem solving and higher levels of user satisfaction than the linear system. Specifically, the nonlinear system enabled users to make fast er and more accurate decisions on perceptual problem tasks than did th e linear system. For analytical problem tasks, users performed faster with the nonlinear system; however, there was no significant differenc e in accuracy. User satisfaction was higher with the nonlinear system under both perceptual and analytical tasks.