Browsing Experiments

In [DeVocht-94] a number of browsing experiments are described, combining different hyperdocument structures, different navigation aids and different browsing strategies. The purpose of these experiments was to find out which structures, navigation aids and browsing strategies are best.

Although the range of possible combinations was large, the experiments lead to some clear conclusions, useful for both authors, readers and hypertext system builders:

The fish-eye view facility was not considered in the experiments because the experiments were aimed at discovering the structure of distributed hyperdocuments, of which the system cannot show a fish-eye view because the structure is not known by a single site.

The bread-crumbs facility was also not considered in the experiments because the experiments assume that a reader always recognizes a node that was visited before, without needing bread crumbs as a reminder.