From: jorn@MCS.COM (Jorn Barger) Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.human-factors,sci.cognitive...mostly all I'm after is some decent hypertext theory, that WWWeb designers can agree on, and seek guidance from... and there seems to be a pretty conspicuous gap in this area, and a powerful smoke-and- mirrors show trying to fill in, whenever there's money involved...Subject: A fresh start for hypertext theory?
Date: 7 Feb 1996 12:39:43 -0600 Summary: tying design theory to cog sci
From what I can tell, hypertext theorists don't even see themselves as human-factors engineers, and actually look down at "engineering" as being on some lower level (below "theory").
So I'm inclined to write them off, as a group-- unless someone can show me there's some vein of sanity there, as well...
One of the points made (indirectly) in the recent flamewar on comp.text.sgml was that academic hypertext theory needs to be grounded in cognitive science... and I have even less interest in that aspect!
But I assume it can be done, and probably has been somewhat, somewhere. It hasn't percolated down to the WWWeb though, that I've seen...
The sorts of connection I can imagine being made include: - A basic ergonomic principle that you want the most commonly accessed info to be the easiest to find - A cognitive principle that more-detailed info is accessed via less-detailed generalizations of it - A cognitive principle that a set of generalizations is most easily grasped if they're unified in some way-- a time sequence, for example - A principle about foreground and background, that background elements should be kept uniform if you don't want them to be distracting - A principle about planning/economics, that before you invest time/ effort in an action, you want to estimate its cost and benefit - A principle about visual contrast, that one can achieve emphasis via: fontsize, style, color, whitespace, capital letters, etc. - A principle about reading effort, and the relative 'expense' of reading a few words vs reading a full line (and many related contrasts)These would provide a basis for most of the design-points I stress in my style pages...