“Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the HyperTIES Workstation Browser”, 1991 ():
Since browsing hypertext can present a formidable cognitive challenge, user interface design plays a major role in determining acceptability. In the Unix workstation version of HyperTIES, a research-oriented prototype, we focused on design features that facilitate browsing.
We first give a general overview of HyperTIES and its markup language. Customizable documents can be generated by the conditional text feature that enables dynamic and selective display of text and graphics.
In addition we present:
an innovative solution to link identification: pop-out graphical buttons of arbitrary shape.
application of pie menus to permit low cognitive load actions that reduce the distraction of common actions, such as page turning or window selection.
multiple window selection strategies that reduce clutter and housekeeping effort.
We preferred piles-of-tiles, in which standard-sized windows were arranged in a consistent pattern on the display and actions could be done rapidly, allowing users to concentrate on the contents.
…The more recent NeWS version of HyperTIES on the SUN workstation uses two large windows that partition the screen vertically. Each window can have links and users can decide whether to put the destination article on top of the current window or on the other window. The pie menus made it rapid and easy to permit such a selection. When users click on a selectable target a pie menu appears (Figure 1) and allows users to specify in which window the destination article should be displayed (practically users merely click then move the mouse in direction of the desired window). This strategy is easy to explain to visitors and satisfying to use. An early pilot test with 4 subjects was run, but the appeal of this strategy is very strong and we have not conducted more rigorous usability tests.
In the author tool, we employ a more elaborate window strategy to manage the 15–25 articles that an author may want to keep close at hand. We assume that authors on the SUN/HyperTIES will be quite knowledgeable in UNIX and Emacs and therefore would be eager to have a richer set of window management features, even if the perceptual, cognitive, and motor load were greater. Tab windows have their title bars extending to the right of the window, instead of at the top. When even 15 or 20 windows are open, the tabs may still all be visible for reference or selection, even though the contents of the windows are obscured. This is a convenient strategy for many authoring tasks, and it may be effective in other applications as well.