HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
SECOND EDITION
HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
SECOND EDITION
The physical layout of an organization often reflects the formal hierarchy: each department is on a different floor, with sections working in the same area of an office. If someone from sales wants to talk to someone from marketing then one of them must walk to the other's office. The contact can be monitored by their respective supervisors. Furthermore, the physical proximity of colleagues can foster a sense of departmental loyalty. An email system has no such barriers; it is as easy to 'chat' to someone in another department as in your own. This challenges the mediating and controlling role of the line managers.
Furthermore, in face-to-face conversation, the manager can easily exert influence over a subordinate: both know their relative positions and this is reflected in the patterns of conversation and in other non-verbal cues. Email messages lose much of this sense of presence and it is more difficult for a manager to exercise authority. The 'levelling' effect even makes it possible for a subordinate to direct messages 'diagonally' across the hierarchy, to one's manager's peers, or, even worse, to one's manager's manager!
The third dimension can be used to help with both network and hierarchy layout. In the case of a network, nodes can be laid out in three dimensions, both reducing clutter and meaning that lines no longer cross, but simply pass by one another. Of course, this has the disadvantage that nodes and lines may obscure one another, but so long as the user can rotate the network or fly around it, these hidden nodes can be seen. Similar techniques can be used for hierarchies. Figure 15.11 shows the
Hypertext offers the ability to navigate through interconnected information in a non-linear fashion, following a particular thread of content or jumping back and forth from one set of pages to another. The fact that the user has control of the pages that are visited next has implications for the structuring of information; the conventional linear flow no longer provides a basic framework. In easy to use pages, information tends to be structured hierarchically as a branching, and roughly equally balanced, tree. To aid the user, it is common for pages to have links back to their immediate parent, to the major node in the hierarchy that they are descended from, and to the parent node. This is because users can access these pages from anywhere: even if one designer has a carefully structured tree of pages, another can incorporate a link across to one of the intermediate nodes or leaf nodes and hence users can enter the hierarchy through an unusual route. Because of the interlinking of information, both within one user's region of the Web and between users, readers typically get lost within the maze of links; the 'lost in hyperspace' problem that beset early hypertext systems has not yet been satisfactorily resolved. There are many approaches to easing the problem: good page design is one, whilst the production of two- and three-dimensional maps of regions of the Web, some of which are dynamic and update as the user browses, is also used.
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