Long-standing User Interfaces: Hyper- and Multi-version Applications

The development of software applications addressed to base users, either single applications or complete suites, has seen in the last decade an incredible explosion. The vast market of free and opensource software has made the amount of available applications so big and varied that even the interfaces for conceptually very similar applications can be incredibly different. Moreover, different versions of the same application of the same brand can be substantially different. Base users are often confused and they are really worried when they have to move to a new package or even to a more recent version of a very well known package. In the end, only a small fraction of new applications or new versions of once known applications, is used.In this paper we will envisage a new way of dealing with what statistical surveys indicate as the major impediment for base users to update their systems by proposing a new interpretation of the concepts of hyperapplication and hypermultiversion application.