CHI '87 Proceedings of the SIGCHI/GI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems and Graphics Interface
KMS: a distributed hypermedia system for managing knowledge in organizations
Communications of the ACM
Making the transition from print to electronic encyclopaedias: adapation of mental models
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies
Document Examiner: delivery interface for hypertext documents
HYPERTEXT '87 Proceedings of the ACM conference on Hypertext
How interface design determines Who has difficulty learning to use a text editor
CHI '83 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The matters that really matter for hypertext usability
HYPERTEXT '89 Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Hypertext
Formal methods for evaluating information retrieval in hypertext systems
SIGDOC '93 Proceedings of the 11th annual international conference on Systems documentation
The Zephyr Help Instance: promoting ongoing activity in a CSCW system
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Answer Garden 2: merging organizational memory with collaborative help
CSCW '96 Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
A Learning Agent that Assists the Browsing of Software Libraries
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Collaborative Support for Informal Information in Collective Memory Systems
Information Systems Frontiers
Effects of scent and breadth on use of site-specific search on e-commerce Web sites
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI)
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Modeling web navigation: methods and challenges
ITWP'03 Proceedings of the 2003 international conference on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization
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Hypertext offers users a simple, flexible way to navigate through electronic information systems but at the potential risk of becoming lost in the network of interconnected pieces of information. A study was conducted on information retrieval using a commercial hypertext based help system. It was found that the predominant search strategy was “browsing” (characterized by scanning tables of contents and paging through topics), rather than employing the indexes (“analytical search”). Although subjects did not become lost, individuals with better spatial visualization ability, as measured by a standardized test, were faster at retrieving information and returned to the top of the information hierarchy less often than those with poorer spatial visualization ability. These results support previous studies that have found a strong preference by users to browse in hypertext systems and extend those findings to a new domain (help), a different type of user interface, and a different information architecture. In addition, the results demonstrate the importance of spatial visualization ability for efficient navigation and information retrieval in a hierarchical hypertext system.