HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Multimedia and HyperText: The Internet and Beyond, by Jakob Nielsen, SunSoft (1995).

https://books.google.nl/books?id=KgZXCCfP0rQC&pg=PA469&lpg=P...

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Jakob-Nielsen/dp/0125184085/ref=s...

I hadn't come across this book before, but I popped for the Kindle edition, and found an excerpt about HyperTIES. It also goes into fascinating detail about many other early hypermedia systems. Jakob Nielsen writes deep well-researched books and articles about usability and user interface design, and he gives excellent talks and keynotes! (He's aka "guru of Web page usability", "king of usability", and "usability Pope", but definitely not "usability Godfather"! ;) )

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakob_Nielsen_(usability_consu...

https://www.nngroup.com/people/jakob-nielsen/

His raises important points about Hyperties' design being focused on ease-of-use by museum visitors and ease-of-authoring by museum curators and historians, the simple consistent keyboard interface, configurable link colors, and the definition window at the bottom of the screen that previews descriptions of link targets in context before you even visit them (often making it not necessary to even follow a link and lose your context). And he describes the different touchscreen interfaces like the "Lift-Off" strategy that Rich Potter designed and empirically evaluated with Hyperties. Some of these ideas are useful but missing features that I wish modern web browsers would natively support (like pie menus, of course).

What Jakob Nelson's book didn't mention was that the Sun NeWS research version also featured built-in and use-defined pie menus for navigation, window management, font and color selection, embedded PostScript applets with interactive widgets, scalable color PostScript pictures and animations, pop-up cut-out embedded graphical links, as well as tabbed windows in the emacs based authoring tool.

>Hyperties (1983)

>Hyperties was started as a research project by Ben Shneiderman [Shneiderman 1987b] at the University of Maryland around 1983. It was originally called TIES as an abbreviation for The Interactive Encyclopedia System, but since that name was trademark by somebody else, the name was changes to Hyperties to indicate the use of hypertext concepts in the system.

>Since 1987 Hyperties has been available as a commercial product on standard PCs from Cognetics Corporation. Research continues at the University of Maryland, where a workstation version has been implemented on Sun workstations.

>One of the interesting aspects of the commercial version of Hyperties is that it works with the plain text screen shown in Figure 3.3. It is thus suited for DOS users. Hyperties also works with the main graphics formats on PCs and PS/2s and can display color images if the screen can handle them.

>The interaction techniques in Hyperties are extremely simple and allow the interface to be operated without a mouse. Some of the text on the screen is highlighted and the user can activate those anchors either by clicking on them with a mouse, touching if a touch screen is available, or simply by using the arrow keys to move the cursor until it is over the text and then hitting ENTER. Hyperties uses the arrow keys in a special manner called "jump keys," which cause the cursor to jump in a single step directly to the next active anchor in the direction of the arrow. This way of using arrow keys has been optimized for hypertext where there are normally only a few areas on the screen that the user can point to and the use of keys has been measured to be slightly faster than the mouse (see Chapter 6).

Figure 3.3:

https://i.imgur.com/0fooyZs.png

>In the example in Figure 3.3, the user is activating the string "Xerox PARC," which is indicated by inverse video. In the color version of Hyperties it is possible for the user to edit a preference file to determine other types of feedback for selections such as the use of contrasting color.

>Instead of taking the user directly to the destination node as almost all other hypertext systems do, Hyperties at first lets the user stay at the same navigational location and displays only a small "definition" at the bottom of the screen. This definition provides the user with a prospective view of what would happen if the link were indeed followed to its destination and it allows the user to see the information in the context of the anchor point. In many cases just seeing the definition is enough. Otherwise the user can of course choose to complete the link.

>A Hyperties link points to an entire "article," which may consist of several pages. Users following the link will always be taken to the first page of the article and will have to page through it themselves. This set-up is in contrast to the KMS model, where a link always points to a single page, and to the Intermedia model where a link points to a specific text string within an article. The advantage of the Hyperties model is that authors do not need to specify destinations very precisely. They just indicate the name of the article they want to link to, and the authoring system completes the link.

>The same text phrase will always point to the same article in Hyperties, which again simplifies the authoring interface but makes the system less flexible. Many applications call for having different destinations, depending on the context of perhaps on the system's model of the user's level of expertise.

>Many of the design choices in Hyperties follow from the original emphasis on applications like museum information systems. These applications need a very simple reading interface without advanced facilities like overview diagrams (which cannot be supported on plain DOS machines anyway). Furthermore, the writers of the hypertexts were museum curators and historians who are mostly not very motivated for learning complex high-technology solutions, so the similarity of the Hyperties authoring facilities to traditional text processing was well suited for the initial users. Now Hyperties is being used for a much wider spectrum of applications.

>The commercial version of Hyperties uses a full-screen user interface as shown in Figure 3.3, whereas the research system on the Sun uses a two-frame approach similar to that of KMS.

He compares and contrasts the designs and features of many different hypertext systems. Here's a section on pointing devices that discusses the "Lift-Off" touch screen strategy developed for Hyperties, which explains the importance of performing empirical user studies, and measuring the performance of specific applications, as opposed to just guessing colors and whinging input handing strategies:

>Pointing Devices

>Almost all current hypertext systems are used with a mouse as the pointing device. Several human factors studies of computer interfaces in general have shown that the mouse is a good pointing device, and it has certainly seen wide use in recent years.

>Ewing et al. [1986] compared the mouse with a special use of the keyboard arrow keys for activating hypertext anchors in Hyperties. This special use of the arrow keys has them jump the cursor in a single step to the hypertext anchor that is nearest to the previous cursor location in the direction indicated by the arrow key pushed by the user. It turned out that the mouse was somewhat slower than this special use of the arrow keys (3.3 min. vs. 2.8 min. for anchors that are close by and 3.5 min. vs. 3.3 min. for anchors farther away).

>For some hypertext applications, such as information kiosks, the mouse is too fragile to be used. In these situations it is common to use a touch screen as the pointing device instead. Touch screens are not used in the standard protected office environment because having to raise their arms quickly becomes tiresome for users and because the touch screens are normally less precise than the mouse.

>The simplest implementations of touch screens emulate the mouse and can therefore be used with any hypertext system without any need to change the software.

>Touch screens can, however, be used in several different ways to activate hypertext anchors. Potter et al. [1989] tested several strategies for activating anchors in Hyperties, including the "land-on" strategy, which activates a point on the screen the moment the user touches that point (similar to a MouseDown event in mouse-driven interfaces); and the "take-off" strategy, which activates the point which the user last touched when the hand is taken off the screen (similar to MouseUp events). Users performed about the same with these two strategies but had a tendency to be slightly slower with the take-off screens. Error rates were significantly lower with the take-off strategy since users could see what they had selected before lifting their fingers.

>Potter et al. also tested a touch screen strategy called "first-contact", which activates the first selectable area on the screen entered by the user's finger. If the user touches down on selectable area, the result is the same as the land-on strategy, but if the user touches down on a blank area, nothing is selected until the user's finger has moved to the first active region on the screen (similar to a combination of MouseEnter and MouseWithin events in a mouse system) There was no statistically significant difference between the first-contact and the take-off strategies in this experiment done with Hyperties, even though fairly large and significant differences had been found in an earlier experiment [Potter et al. 1988] on selection in a traditional text environment. In the earlier, non-hypertext experiment, subjects had to select targets that were two characters in width and were separated by a two character space. For such a task, the first-contact strategy gave rise to a lot more errors but was somewhat faster than the lift-off strategy where users could see what they were selecting. In Hyperties, however, the anchors are typically whole words which are far apart on the screen so users have a much smaller risk of touching something by mistake and they don't need to rely as much on the feedback. The different outcome of these two experiments shows the importance of conducting usability tests of as high a validity as possible with regard to the actual final use of whatever is being tested. For selecting hypertext anchors, the first-contact and take-off strategies performed about the same, so the take-off strategy might be chosen by a designer because it is the simplest to explain to users. But for a text editing application, one should choose the first-contact strategy.

>Potter, R., Berman, M., and Shneiderman, B. (1989). An experimental evaluation of three touch screen strategies within a hypertext database. Intl. J. Human-Computer Interaction 1, 1, 41-52.

>Touch screen were more usable when a take-off strategy rather than a land-on (touch-down) strategy was used for registering user selections.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/trs/88-04/88-04.ps

Here's another discussion of the lessons learned by Hyperties:

>In contrast, Shneiderman [1989], in his discussion of the lessons learnt from building more than thirty hypertext structures for Hyperties, emphasized the key lesson that each project was different and had to have its information structured according to a principle that was suited for its specific domain. Shneiderman's experience also showed, however, that it is necessary to have a single managing editor to coordinate a project and to copy edit the final result. So there is certainly the potential for tension among the people whose work it will be to create future, large information bases. Just as software developers may feel frustrated by user interface standards restricting their design options, information base developers may be frustrated by having to place consistency over their individual creativity. One hopes that the unique individual needs of each project will provide enough variation to keep this problem to a minimum, but only further experience can tell.

>Shneiderman, B. (1989). Reflections on authoring, editing, and managing hypertext. In Barrett, E. (Ed.): The Society of Text, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 115-31.

>Surveys several Hyperties applications, including one about the Hubble Space Telescope implemented in a two-frame version of a Sun workstation. The chapter also contains a discussion of the authoring aids in Hyperties. A large part of the chapter is dedicated to the lessons learnt from building more than 30 hypertext structures for Hyperties. One key lesson is that each project was different and had to have its information structured according to a principle that was suited for its specific domain. Experience shows that it is necessary to have a single managing editor to coordinate a project and to copy edit the final result.

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Shneiderman1989Reflection...

Here's a reference and description of an early hypermedia system called "gIBIS" that used color links, however it doesn't mention and I don't know which colors it used -- but according to Marc Andreesen, there are only four good ones, so you can probably guess ;) .

>Conklin, J., and Begeman, M. L. (1988). gIBIS: A hypertext tool for exploratory policy discussion. ACM Trans. Office Information Systems 6, 4 (October 1988), 303-331. Also in Proc. 2nd Conf. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (Portland, OR, 26-28 September) 140-152.

>Describes the gIBIS system (graphical Issue-Based Information System). gIBIS is used in the MCC Design Journal project to provide a computerized record of a software design process with special emphasis on capturing the rationale behind the design decisions through hypertext links among issues, positions and arguments. gIBIS is designed for color workstations and uses color to indicate node and link status (for a color screen shot, see [Begeman and Conklin 1988]). Preliminary empirical observations indicate that users had a greater tendency to add supporting comments than to add objecting ones. Some users complained about the danger of premature segmentation of new ideas and would have liked a proto-node" simply to record ideas before structuring them. The first half of this paper (describing the system itself but not the empirical evidence about its actual use) can also be found in [Begeman and Conklin 1988].

Unfortunately this PDF is not color, but here is the Begeman and Conklin 1988 iBIS paper:

http://csis.pace.edu/~marchese/CS835/Readings/p303-conklin_g...

Hypermedia systems covered in this book:

Memex (1945), Augment/NLS (1962-1976), Xanadu (1965), Hypertext Editing System (1967) and FRESS (1968), Aspen Movie Map (1978), KMS (1983), Hyperties (1983), NoteCards (1985), Symbolics Document Examiner (1985), Intermedia (1985), Guide (1986), HyperCard (1987), The World Wide Web and Mosaic, HTML, Hyper-G and Harmony, Navitext SAM, gIBIS, Half-Dead Hypertext and the Electronic Business Card, conversions of The Manual of Medical Therapeutics and Oxford English Dictionary, and a comprehensively annotated bibliography of surveys, societies, compendium, conferences, journals and magazines, videotapes, books about the Internet, and references to classics like:

Bush, V (1945) As we may think. Atlantic Monthly, July, pp. 101-108.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_We_May_Think

Engelbart, D. C. and English, W. K. (1968). A research center for augmenting human intellect.

https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/ENS/FONDIHM/2020/papers/Englebart-Au...

Kay, A. and Goldberg, A. (1977) Personal dynamic media. IEEE Computer 10, 3 (March) 31-41.

http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf

Lippman, A. (1980). Movie-Maps: An application of the optical videodisk to computer graphics. Computer Graphics 14, 3, 32-42.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/965105.807465 (does anyone know a link to a pdf of this, please?)

Nelson, T. (1974). Computer Lib / Dream Machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

http://worrydream.com/refs/Nelson-ComputerLibDreamMachines19...

[Also check out the other great stuff in the same directory -- thanks Bret Victor for hosting it:]

http://worrydream.com/refs/

Nelson, T.: Literary Machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_Machines

http://www.eastgate.com/catalog/LiteraryMachines.html

[Here's Ted Nelson talking about Jump Links:]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPM3GqjMR4

Rheingold, H. (1985). Tools for Thought: The People and Ideas behind the Next Computer Revolution.

https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/

⬐ DonHopkins

Here's an even more interesting version of Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay "As We May Think", annotated by Douglas Englebart:

https://www.dougengelbart.org/archives/artifacts/annotated-A...

The MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium

https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/258/

>Influence on Doug Engelbart

>Scanned image of Doug's copy of the article

>Doug's copy of the article circa 1962 - check it out (courtesy Computer History Museum)

>Watch Doug describe his first encounter of "As We May Think"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvZL-Bj_cgw

>Map of Philippine island where Doug first encountered the article.

>Because we're on the Doug Engelbart Institute website, we've added what we know about Doug's first encounter of Bush's article, and how it influenced his work, as one case example of Bush's influence on this Pioneer of the Information Age.

>In September 1945, shortly after arriving in the Phillippines to serve as a US Navy radio and radar technician, then twenty year old Doug Engelbart ran across the latest issue of Life Magazine, which included a reprint of Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think." He found the magazine in a Red Cross library located in a traditional hut on stilts on the island of Leyte. Watch Doug describe his first encounter (and in more detail here in his CHM Oral History video). Additional accounts can be found in his Stanford Oral History Interview.

>The article made a big impression on Doug at the time, but did not appear in his work until around 1959 or 1960 when he began developing his "augmentation framework." He dug up a copy of the article to study in depth (see his notes in the margins in his copy of the article at right), and described it in detail in his seminal 1962 report Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework (beginning at paragraph 3a4), including several quotes from Bush's article, and discussion as to potential relevance.

>While preparing said Report, Doug wrote a letter to Vannevar Bush, seeking permission to quote his article, outlining his own work, and describing his earlier encounters with Bush's 1945 article. Doug enclosed with this letter a summary description of his work titled "Program On Human Effectiveness." See also Doug's Abstract for his talk at this 1995 Bush Symposium for a brief glimpse into how his thinking evolved vis-a-vis Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think."

That's the first thought that came to my mind. I love hearing ted nelson explain it hhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPM3GqjMR4 It is a good effort to bring that concept to life.

This video is better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac

1a - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMKy52Intac&t=327s

1b - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gPM3GqjMR4

1c - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGKbRcvIZT8

1d - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyzgoeeloJA

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_o8q4Sp-w0

2.5- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xYwgJW7T8o

3 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV_vYkSmkxk

⬐ Rhinobird

and, these:

4 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLYz2vWv1wg

5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsbrEOxVPcg

⬐ dredmorbius

Someone might care to suggest to Mr. Nelson the prospect of the visible connections afforded by YouTube playlists....